


Vignettes from The War and the End of the World

by PreludeInZ



Category: Team Fortress 2
Genre: Angst, F/M, Feels, Love Story, Mann vs. Machine, Robot Apocalypse, Romance, Sad, surprisingly little interaction with robots
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2014-10-27
Updated: 2015-03-25
Packaged: 2018-02-22 21:51:21
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 29
Words: 39,696
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2523017
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/PreludeInZ/pseuds/PreludeInZ
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>A story about MvM, with Scout/Pauling squarely in the middle of it all. I hope you like pining. And badass little ladies who are totally running this shit, don't even get in their way.<br/>------<br/>Introduction</p><p>It was not a war they were going to win. More importantly, it was a war they were definitely going to lose.</p><p>The mercs were made for war, by more than just definition. Born and bred for it, reared in blood and fire, in the heat of the Australian Outback, in a shadowy laboratory in Stuttgart, in an empty back lot in Boston, playing baseball amid broken glass. Nine of the best and worst men in the world, locked in a war with new and different rules, where the laws of death and dismemberment were suspended, and you clocked out at the end of the day for an exorbitant paycheck, then got up in the morning to do it again. A microcosm of a war. Contained by the reasons and resources of those wiser than the men who waged it. A war with more blood and less cause than any before it.</p><p>This is not the story of that war.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. If We Don't Look

The teleporters had not stopped working. By all rights they should have, but had not. Of course, that wasn’t strictly true, because they  _had_  stopped working. But not permanently. They had all been taken offline, but they could still be brought back  _online_ , which was somewhat disquieting. Engie had only tried it for a laugh. For shits and giggles. Because they weren’t supposed to work. It would have been easy to make them stop working, permanently. So using them always had the feeling of walking into a trap.

That was not the only problem, but it was the most salient of what problems there were. The most salient of the problems with the teleporters, anyway. The most salient problem overall was that they were surrounded by robots and being slowly starved to death.

If it had been a straight fight, that would at least have been something. It would at least have been over by now. But no. There was a wall around them. The last order they’d been given had been to hold the line, but there wasn’t a line. There was just a little knot in the middle, and Medic and Engineer had rigged up something that kept the robots out, except the robots weren’t trying to get in, so whether it actually kept robots out was more of a hypothesis than a theory. They didn’t even bother. The wall encompassed a circle three miles wide, and was made of killer robots. Engi had done the math. There were thousands of them. And they just stood there, waiting.

The worst part (one of the worst parts, there were many and these varied in worstness by the day) was that there didn’t need to be thousands of them. There needed to maybe be a few dozen. A few dozen would have been plenty to take out nine antsy, angry, slowly starving mercenaries with limited resources. The best theory available was that they were waiting for something. It was about as comforting as the fact that the teleporters could still be made to work.

The teleporters felt weird now, too. It had taken Scout a long time to get used to them the first time around, now they were different every time. Blinking into existence in a cold, empty warehouse, this time he felt momentarily as though he were upside-down and for seventeen seconds his teeth tasted like pennies.

"How long?"

Engineer had been waiting, with a battered slide rule and a dog-eared pocket reference. He thumbed both for a few moments, and did most of the math in his head. “Twenty minutes,” he answered absently and pocketed his instruments, in favour of a notebook and a stubby pencil, with which he made notes in a detailed, inscrutable shorthand.

"Jesus. Not long?" Scout tried to spit out a mouthful of non-existent pennies. It did not work.

"Long enough. S’gettin’ worse. You let me worry about it, though, getcher head on straight. We need you on the perimeter."

Scout paused and looked around hopefully. It was a massive warehouse. Not that there were any small warehouses in the badlands, Mann Co didn’t really do things by halves. Heavy and Soldier were already looking for supplies. All things considered, they weren’t really doing too badly. Not from a survival sort of standpoint. They’d lasted two weeks so far, and were fixed to last longer. Hold the line.

"I was kinda hopin’ I might…I mean, if we ain’t gonna be here long, and if Heavy and Soldier are busy…"

"We ain’t gonna be here for long, she ain’t gonna be here  _at all_. Only reason we even are is for food. And bullets. And because this damn thing,” Engie kicked the teleporter, “was the only one of these bastards I could get back online at short notice. I forgot it was even here, dunno why it is. Was in a crate when I came through, s’only lucky I had enough room to bust out. Lucky I wasn’t crushed. Lucky we all got through in one piece, lucky the bottom half of you ain’t got shunted sideways into Uruguay or some other damn place where it ain’t gonna be useful. We lost twenty minutes. So you’re gonna go get on the perimeter.”

Understandably, things were a little tense. But if even the Engineer could be terse and irritable, then things were worse than he was willing to tell Scout. And even Scout knew better than to start a fight about it. “Right. Okay. Sorry. S’just…we ain’t gonna find her if we don’t look.”

"I’m thinkin’ we ain’t gonna find her at all."

This was met with a painful silence. Scout didn’t want to hear what was wrong with the teleporters, and he especially didn’t want to hear that the smartest person he knew didn’t think they were going to find Miss Pauling.

Engie sighed and pushed his goggles up to rub his eyes. “Hell. I don’t mean that, Scout. You’re too scrawny to carry much and it ain’t like it’d matter if you saw any of ‘em comin’. I know why you came. Go on, get.”

"I’m not scrawny." There was a hint of the old banter, even if things were dire. "Come off it. I’m…lean."

"Yeah, well, we’re all gettin’ lean. Ain’t gonna make you special much longer. Clock’s tickin’ boy, get a move on."

Scout didn’t need to be told twice. Well, actually, he had, but probably not more than twice. “Right. Thanks. I’ll hurry.”


	2. Daylight Behind Her

She was here. Or she had been. Had to  _be_ , the room was still warm from the little space heater she’d wired up to a car battery. There was a little camp stove and a neat stack of canned food. A chipped and faded mug that said “I Hate Mondays” and still had a film of dried tomato soup clinging to the inside. She’d cut the cushions off of all the chairs in the office and made herself a little bed. Correction, all the chairs but one. This chair was pulled up to the desk, and the desk was piled high with files. At the end of the world as they knew it, Miss Pauling was still a secretary.

And she was here, and Scout was going to find her if it killed him, hell with the teleporter, the others could go back. The others might even help look. Bastards. It was Miss Pauling, they had to. Goddamn bastards. Engie maybe hadn’t meant what he said, but he’d still said it.

But that wasn’t fair. Heavy and Soldier would help. It was just that there wasn’t time any more, and it was risky. Engie had been right, she wasn’t likely to be here, because why would she be? Even with the evidence right in front of him, Scout didn’t know why she’d have picked this place to hide out. There were better places. Heavy and Soldier were mostly concerned with food and munitions, which they knew they would find. Miss Pauling had been MIA for two weeks, she was an unknown quantity. But they’d drop everything if Scout could prove he’d found her, and obviously he could. The entire office looked like everything about her, with the neat stack of cans and the files on the desk sorted according to some utterly impenetrable scheme. And a shotgun he hadn’t noticed previously, halfway disassembled on an upended crate on the floor. Her glasses on the desk. Obviously he had to go get the others. Part of him sort of didn’t want to.  Most of him. He didn’t want their help at all, they’d given up. They were rooting around in the warehouse, trying to scrabble a hold onto something that would help them all stay stuck in the middle of this godawful mess for as long as possible.

The mercs didn’t have much going for them, but at least they had each other. If nothing came of the robot siege, at least they’d be able to tear each other apart. Someone was going to have to. The Administrator was, by all appearances, gone. Probably forever, Scout didn’t figure she was going to be able to get around the cordon of killer robots. And if she was gone, than Miss Pauling was alone. There was a generally held conviction that Miss Pauling could take care of herself, but Scout didn’t share it. Or, anyway, it wasn’t that he thought she  _couldn’t_ , so much as that she shouldn’t have to. Complex personal feelings aside, it just didn’t seem right to leave her alone in the middle of a robot apocalypse. Maybe this was an old fashioned sentiment, but it was how he’d been raised.

She had to still be here. The room was still warm, even though a window at the back had been opened, out onto a fire escape. One of the ones that tilted in the middle, like a see saw. Cold November air blew in and suddenly it felt like it was blowing right through him. “Miss Pauling?” he called tentatively. The office was high above the main floor. Maybe they’d scared her. Engi had needed to bust out of a crate when he’d come through, that must’ve made a hell of a racket. Miss Pauling was sensible. Her shotgun half in pieces in the middle of the room. She would’ve hidden.

"Don’t move."

It was her, but she didn’t quite sound like herself. A little nasal, congested, maybe. Well, of course she’d pick up a cold all alone out here, make it worse out on the fire escape. “Hey! I knew we’d find you!” The “we” was him being charitable. “You can c’mon in, it’s just me, but there’s Engie and Heavy and Soldier, they’ll be…”

"Scout, I  _mean it_ , don’t move.”

He could see the shape of her now, silhouetted in one of the dirty, wire reinforced windows. She’d moved into view and there was the shadow of a gun in her hand. There was midmorning daylight behind her, sharpening her outline. Of course it was her. ”Okay.”

"They have your voices. The robots. So I need you to prove it’s really you _.”_

 _“_ How do they…”

"The tapes. The video. Reels and reels of it, I don’t know how they got it. All the security cameras with audio, they took it. Anything you’ve said, they can say. And I’ve been awake for twenty hours and they’ve done it before, so you understand I’m a little jumpy."

Shit. She sounded more than just stuffed up, she sounded cold and stressed and tired. “S’gonna be hard, on accounta how I talk too damn much. Ain’t much I could say that I ain’t said before.”

"You’re telling me."

He thought a minute. “There’s one thing, maybe.”

"What?"

"Well, maybe you wouldn’t like it."

"Scout, if it’s you, I’m freezing to death. If it’s not you, I’m going to blow your fucking head off you goddamn horrible robot, I hate you all, I wish I had a big damn magnet, I’d pick you all up and turn you into paperclips and staples and anal thermometers. Stupid fucking robots."

The hell with whether she liked it or not, it was truer now than ever. “I've _kinda_  got the biggest damn crush on you, Miss Pauling. Seriously, ain’t even kidding, I think you are goddamn adorable.”

She leaned over and stuck her head through the window. She looked a little windblown and haggard, and her nose was pink and a bit runny, but she smiled a little all the same. “Scout, everybody knows that. Of course  _I_ know that. I wouldn't be even a surprised if the stupid fucking _robots_ know that.”

"Sure, but that ain’t what you said." He crossed the room to tilt the window further open and help her through. "And I know I ain’t told anybody before."


	3. Downward Trends in Graphs

Theoretically, if Miss Pauling hadn’t wanted to be found, she wouldn’t have been. Scout was prickly about the fact that they could have missed her completely if he hadn’t insisted on checking. Still, Dell Connagher was the best strategic mind they had, absent of Spy, and he’d been sure that wherever Miss Pauling was, she would have been there for a reason.

But she wouldn’t say what. The warehouse was a random and wayward location for her to be, and she was cagey. Well, that was fine. They’d spent more time here than they should have and it wasn’t like they couldn’t come back. He thought about taking Scout aside and telling him to have a look around the place, but if Miss Pauling wouldn’t talk about it openly, it was probably too important. Scout had enough to worry about. He’d been given incentive enough to have a look around the perimeter, anyway.

“Well, Miss Pauling, I’m sorry we didn’t hook up with you sooner. You look like you’ve been through the wringer.” He was still dangling opportunities for her to talk about what she’d been up to, but knew better than to think she’d bite. It was neither the time nor the place, in any case.

She did look tired, edgy. But she had been plainly glad to see them, calling friendly hellos to Heavy and Soldier as she followed Scout down the rattling metal staircase from the warehouse office. She had even been able to point them in the right direction as far as what they were looking for, and they were ready to leave that much sooner.

"I didn’t think you would come all the way out here. It’s close to the robots, I didn’t think you would risk it." Pauling glanced at Scout when she said this, with a little half-smile she probably didn’t think anyone would notice. Naturally everyone did.

Well, at least the weekly pool about when the pair of them would stop being morons about each other could resume. It would help pass the time.

"Is time we left," Heavy rumbled, putting a massive hand on Miss Pauling’s shoulder. "I am right to say Miss Pauling goes first."

"Negative!" Soldier corrected. "You do not put your Lieutenant on point! I will go first!"

"It doesn’t matter," Pauling declined, looking around the warehouse absently. "Where are you all based?"

Not for the first time, Engineer had the sense that she had been here because she was looking for something. It seemed like she hadn’t found it. “We pulled back into the museum. Got defenses up, but they’re just sittin’, not been tested. Respectfully, Miss Pauling, this ain’t the place to talk tactics. The four of us gotta be moving out.”

"Right, right." She was still distracted, with her hands on her hips, staring down a long corridor of crates stacked at twice her height, and chewing her lower lip. "It just makes no sense."

Heavy picked up the crate of canned goods he’d assembled. No one liked to think about how old they were or the fact that botulism existed. “Many things do not make sense. We have a list. It is on the other side of the teleporter. Soldier goes first. Then Miss Pauling. We will follow.”

"I _do_ like lists," she agreed wearily. "Do you also have beds? And heat? And running water? And food that isn’t canned?"

There was an uncomfortable silence. Miss Pauling looked like she could do with sleep and warmth and a shower and a good meal. But then, so could they all. At least she would be marginally safer than she had been out here on her own. “We kinda been roughin’ it…” Engie answered apologetically.

"I’ll settle for the list, then." She pushed her glasses up onto her forehead and rubbed her eyes. "Soldier, after you."

"Hoo-rah!" With an armful of ammo cases, looped about with ammo belts, and a backpack stuffed with ordinance, there was an unsaid hope between Heavy and Engineer, familiar with the effects of the teleporter, that the museum still existed after Soldier popped through on the other side.

It occurred to Engineer that Miss Pauling had never used the teleporter before. It seemed it had occurred to her as well, as she now stared at the faintly glowing pad hovering over the device with visible trepidation. “Umm. This won’t be pleasant, will it?”

"Hard to say. I mean, likely not. S’different for everyone. I had a couple good ones, though. Felt like a bubble bath, once. Another time like my feet were made of my grandma’s spongecake. That weren’t so much pleasant as it was less unpleasant than usual. Best just to get it over with, Miss Pauling. Ain’t gonna get any better."

She was a brave little thing, anyway. Miss Pauling set her shoulders, closed her eyes, and stepped forward onto the teleporter. There was a flash of fear on her face as she whirled and vanished, and then she was gone.

It was quiet in the warehouse again. What a hell of a place to come out, what was the point of it. Engineer wasn’t usually one to disparage the availability of resources, regardless of what they were, but they didn’t do him much good if he had nothing to plan for. Hopefully Miss Pauling had come here for a reason. Hopefully she would be able to tell them more, once she’d been fed and had slept. Hopefully there was a plan. Hopefully she had been looking for something. Hopefully they could find it.

"Is a strange place to find her," Heavy remarked. He hadn’t put down the crates he carried. The weight didn’t seem to trouble him. "I did not think even to look."

"Well, Scout did. Got me wondering if she wanted to be found. Strange place we all found ourselves. Hope they got a stopwatch on the other end. I ain’t happy about a great many things right now, there’s problems we got that I can’t rightly reckon how we’re gonna solve ‘em." Engineer looked up at the walkway that ran around the upper floor of the warehouse. There was only the one office at the far end, daylight glowing through the frosted glass window window of the door. He lifted his left hand to his lips and whistled once, sharply.

Scout was a couple minutes in reappearing. He clambered in through a broken upper window and dropped lightly down onto the catwalk. He joined them on the warehouse floor, not apparently winded. “They ain’t here. I mean, none I saw. Got up to the roof, had a look around. I think it’s okay.”

"You’ll still want to lay low a while. Give it a day, take the night off. Keep quiet, stay inside."

"Yeah, yeah. Still. Gonna take a couple days to get back. I been thinkin' maybe I oughta get an early start…"

Heavy shook his head. “Do not move by night. Stick to the mineshafts. You will be bored. It will not kill you. If you are lucky it will keep you alive.”

"Easy for you t'say."

Engineer sighed. “You knew the deal.”

This got a flare of temper from Scout. “Yeah, and you ain’t gotta talk to me like I didn’t. I found her, she got my place. Was a good idea, I agreed to it. You weren’t even gonna _look,_ you tell her that? Bastards. I know I talk a lotta shit, an' I know ain't none of you listen to me. I don’t _care._  I know she can take care of herself, that ain't the point. We still shoulda been lookin' for her from the very first day we got pinned down. You gotta tell me it ain’t because you gave up on her. Didn’t it drive you crazy, thinkin' 'bout her out here all alone? Fuckin’ kept me up at night, an’ it’s hard enough to sleep these days anyway. S'worse how you all were bastards about it, ‘cause I known you all long enough to know you ain’t cowards.”

Heavy let him rant, and then reached out to lay a hand on the younger man's shoulder. Then, with surprising gentleness towards someone who had just called him a bastard, "Do not be so nervous. Do as you’re told, you will be fine. She will be safe, we will expect you in two days."

"Day and a half," Scout corrected, petulant. And nervous, obviously, visibly nervous, and taking it out on Heavy and Engineer, because he couldn’t think of anything worse than being alone out here. Worth it, obviously. But not good.

There was really not much more for it, and there was a sense that it would be worse if they hung around much longer. Heavy didn’t put down the crates he carried, but nodded wordlessly to Scout before stepping onto the teleporter. It was a taciturn and unhelpful gesture, but it was better than nothing. Heavy was all right.

Engineer was a minute more, looking around the warehouse. He pulled his slide rule back out of his pocket and tapped it idly on his leg. “It ain’t gonna be so bad,” he offered, conciliatory. “Poke around, might be something worth bringing back in here. We’ll probably come back and have a better look around sometime. Get a headstart for us.”

"I didn’t mean about how you guys’re bastards. Tell Heavy."

It was a truism about Scout that he got less annoying the fewer people there were around. Engi had long suspected it had to do with being the youngest of eight brothers, putting him in a mix with eight other mercs who were all older and more experienced than he was generally made him near unbearably obnoxious. One on one, he seemed just young, instead of immature, less willing to snap back when poked at. It was practically a philosophical problem. A tree falling in a forest surely made a sound. Maybe Scout all on his own was still an irritating prima donna.

But Engie was familiar with downward trends in graphs, and he didn’t really think so. He put a hand on Scout’s shoulder. “Listen, you’ll be fine. Take your time. You did a good thing, and probably no one’ll say it, but I’m proud of you, at least. Maybe that don’t count for much at all. We  _are_  all a parcel of bastards. Maybe you less than the rest of us, though. Sometimes.”

Maybe that helped. Scout grinned, anyway. “Aw, fuck off. I take it back, you are a sappy bastard.”

"Good luck."

It seemed dark in the warehouse, after the bright flash and flare of the teleporter. It would be a long time til dark, and longer til morning. Scout went to have a nap.


	4. Flash of Purple

She had thrown up on someone’s shoes. Demo’s, by the look of them, but she couldn’t be sure. They were red, anyway, but they hadn’t been before. Bright, red, sticky. She choked again and retched up another mouthful, salty and tangy and foul. Someone was shouting for Medic and Demo had his hands on her shoulders, then pulling back her hair.

“Easy, lass, easy. Oh, aye, better out than in, it’s all righ’. Come on, they’re rubber, it’ll wash right off. Not like it’s the first time I gone wadin’ through the blood o’ my comrades.”

Pauling managed to cough and swallow back the rest of it. “It’s tomato soup. No Medic. Just soup. Oh god. I want never to do that again.”

“Any better comin’ up than goin’ down?”

She laughed, in spite of herself. It was not funny. “No. Sorry. Ugh. Where are we?”

“Coal Town.”

The museum, the basement. It had not originally been a basement. It had originally been a mineshaft, but the first layer below Coal Town was all former mineshafts. It was other things now, too, still mineshafty in general demeanour, but mostly less useful, any and all readily available coal having been extracted years ago. There had not been much coal, despite the look of the place.

And the whole enterprise hadn’t resulted in particularly sensible mine shafts. They wandered and meandered and occasionally collapsed. They didn’t always connect up in logical ways, though there were paths through them, if you had a map. Sometimes they were marked, but more often they were marked incorrectly, or with conflicting colour schemes that did more harm than good to anyone trying to navigate them. They were topped by tumbledown shacks, more vigourous shanties, and obstinate, concrete boxes, representing the various eras in which attempts had been made to procure coal. None had lasted very long. Perhaps there was more coal than there seemed, but coal apparently required some stick-to-itiveness to get.

“Okay.” Miss Pauling wiped her hands on the front of her dress as Demo helped her to her feet. Pyro sat in front of the teleporter with a stopwatch in hand, and waved at her cheerfully. Probably cheerfully.

~~“ **It’s really not your colour, sweetheart, you’d do better in green. Five minutes, fourteen seconds.”**~~

“Someone can get me a mop, I feel awful about that. Where is everyone? When Engie and Heavy and Scout get through, I want to talk to all of you. I need to know what you know, I need to tell you what  _I_ know. I need food. Actually, hold off on the food for a while.”

Demo laughed and patted her hair affectionately. It was the sort of gesture that could get a man killed, but Miss Pauling made a few exceptions. “It’s good to see you again, lass, that’s the kind of sensible talk we’ve been feelin’ a sore lack of around here. Which of those ‘ands’ ought to have been an ‘or’? Do ye know?”

The teleporter fritzed again behind her, and Heavy suddenly existed again, bearing a pair of crates.

The stopwatch clicked.  ~~“~~ ~~ **Five minutes, forty-five seconds.”**~~

“Write it down, Pyro, ain’t no use to Engie unless it’s writ down.” Demo hefted a crate off of the stack Heavy carried. “Damned good to see  _these_ , we’re all outta beer and Pyro’s runnin’ low on skittles. Soldier ran off to the armory, lucky we weren’t blown all to hell all the heavy he was haulin’. Scout stayed, then?” Demo cocked his good eye at Miss Pauling. “He found you, eh? Well, about time, we’d have had a devilish fight to convince him to stop looking.”

Heavy answered. “He will be two days. He should take three, but it is Scout. So two.”

Miss Pauling realized suddenly that she was missing the answers to some important questions. “Demo, what do you mean? Heavy?”

Heavy set the other crate down. Miss Pauling stepped sideways before she could be accosted with any further brotherly patting. She wasn’t in the market for brothers at the moment, she wanted mercenaries who did what they were told. “Were you looking for me? Why? Who told you to?”

“Matroyshka, we were not told to do this. We were told to hold our position. But, we have held here for two weeks. There are problems. We have a list, we have much to discuss. Engineer will be back, Scout will be fine. Two days, Matroyshka, trust him. Spy will be back, too. The Engineer is careful with the teleporters, now. This one opened him into a crate in the warehouse.”

It was like her heart had stopped. A single, icy cold flash of realization, and she suddenly understood her mistake. And she turned on her heel, and bounded back onto the teleporter, vanishing again in a flash of purple and fear.

There was half a beat of dead silence following her disappearance. Then Pyro clicked the stopwatch again.  ~~“~~ ~~ **Seven minutes, twenty-eight seconds.”**~~


	5. Nothing Untoward

Well, it was freezing. And pitch dark. In addition to reacquainting her with the rest of her tomato soup, the teleporter had also apparently rendered her blind.

But no, not actually. Her eyes were adjusting, though her head still swam and she had to sit on the packed dirt floor of the warehouse taking deep breaths. There was faint, blurry light coming from the windows that circled the very top of the warehouse. A faint, gold tinted glow from the office where she had originally hid out. Less light than their should have been. Her eyes were wet and she had dropped her glasses. She fumbled and found them again, but didn’t put them on. God, it was cold.

Vulnerable and startled, Miss Pauling scooted a few feet further from the teleporter and tried to get her bearings. “Scout?” she called nervously. “Engie?”

There was a clatter of footsteps on the catwalk above, and then from the darkness at the foot of the staircase up to the office, “Miss Pauling?”

“Here.” She wished it weren’t so dark. Why the hell was it so dark? She had pushed herself over to a crate and grabbed the edge of it to get to her feet. “Scout, where are you?”

He could apparently see better in the dark than she could, because she felt a hand on her arm before she saw him, and then he was just a tall red blur. “Jesus, you came back through. Miss Pauling? You okay? God, don’t tell me you just turned around an’ came straight back.”

Pauling pushed her hair back and put her glasses back on. She sighed shakily and shivered. “I really hate teleporters. I feel like shit. Do they make you feel cold? Why is it so cold?”

“Umm. Yeah, it’s cold. You, uh, maybe you wanna sit down a minute? No, yeah, definitely you do that. Okay? Jesus. What happened? Somethin’ gone wrong on the other end? Are you okay, though? God _damn_ , Miss Pauling, but you’re just shakin' like a leaf here.”

Scout had more or less cajoled her into sitting down on the top of the crate. He still had a hand on her arm and with her eyes nearly all the way adjusted, she could see him staring at her. It was still dark. Okay. “…what happened?”

“Did you just come right back through? I ain’t mean to keep comin’ back to this, but d'you feel okay? Like…I dunno, dizzy or something? Are you crying? God, you ain’t hurt somewhere, are you? Shit, I wish Engie was here. Didn’t he tell you? Um, 'bout the teleporters?”

Miss Pauling was beginning to recover to the point where she could start to get impatient and irritated. Scout tended to babble, but especially when he was startled. “I’m fine. I think. What the hell…just…augh. No. Stop. Just stop a minute. Let me think.”

“Right. Right, okay.”

She didn’t need a minute. She just took a few more deep breaths. Scout hadn’t moved his hand from her arm yet, but his fingers were warm and she wasn’t about to make him. “Okay. Let’s swap a couple questions. I’ll get one of yours first: I think I’m fine. I’m a little dizzy, yes, but mostly I’m cold and it’s dark and I hate teleporters.”

He grinned a little, and she felt a bit better still. “Yeah, me too. More'n usual now. Jesus. How long were you back on the other end?”

“No, it’s not your turn. You tell me…augh, I don’t know. Why is it so dark? And cold?”

Scout paused. “It’s night. Like…I dunno, maybe ten-ish? I ain’t got a watch, I’m not great with time. I slept a while. Miss Pauling, you an' Engie an' them went through maybe twelve hours ago.”

What. That precipitated about a million more questions, but she seized on the first thought she could grasp. “You stayed.”

“Yeah.”

“Why?”

He grimaced. “Shit, I wish Engie had told you. I…um. I don’t know, it’s...well, s'complicated, but that ain't even the half of it. Something got messed up with the teleporters. They…uh. They go outta true, they don’t work the same. Engie says they’re losin’ time somewhere. Way over my head. Umm. I dunno, he said it was somethin’...uh. Somehin' quantum. Maybe? Does that help? Hey, and it ain’t your turn. You wanna come upstairs? S’warmer. You look like hell, Miss Pauling.”

Shit. Well, if Scout thought she looked like hell and was willing to say so, she really _must_ look rough. “Was that your question? Yes. Let’s go upstairs, I hope you didn’t mess around with my desk, I had everything in order.”

Scout helped her to her feet. “No, I didn’t. Don’t think I did, anyway. Here, wait.” He shrugged out of the jacket he wore and handed it to her. “Backburner the questions for a minute, okay? God, you scared the shit outta me.”

“I’m sorry.” She’d pulled his jacket on and more or less swam in it, but it was warm and she wished she could pull her knees up into it and just huddle on the crate a little longer, even if she was fairly sure it was putting splinters in her butt.

“No, don’t be, ain’t what I meant. Hey, c’mere.”

Miss Pauling had never given particular thought to her relationship with Scout. He had a crush on her, obviously, everyone knew that. But she couldn’t really blame him. Even if she wouldn’t admit it, even if she very deliberately put him off and kept him at a firm arm’s length, it was kind of nice. The other mercs were all older—not so old that they were necessarily off-limits, but old enough that they made her feel a lot younger than she was. And the de facto attitude they seemed to adopt in her presence seemed to tend towards the big brotherly. Which was fine, Miss Pauling was an only child. Big brothers were nice. Big, murderous brothers who would destroy anyone who ever crossed her were nicer.

So there was nothing untoward about the way he scooped her off her feet. It was the same way any of the other mercs would have done it, seeing her pale and shaken and shivering and a little unsteady as she was. And she was glad he had, the stairs were high and rickety and she wasn’t feeling as well as she said she was. They were all a lot stronger than she ever remembered, she’d once asked Sniper to give her a boost to retrieve a hacksaw from the top of a shelf, and he’d just picked her up about the waist and lifted her straight up like a dancer. Once she’d tripped down a flight of stairs, carrying a box of old teeth, and twisted her ankle. Heavy had picked her up this exact same way and brought her to see Medic, who scolded her thoroughly for being careless on stairs and careless with teeth.

Pauling hadn’t rested her head on Heavy’s shoulder, though, without meaning to, and thought about how it was kind of nice, even if it was freezing and dark and she was trapped in the middle of an inexplicable robot siege. She had a lot to worry about. Now was really not the time for this.

Still, though, he was warm.


	6. Nine Neat Little Graves for My Boys

He should never have said anything. It didn’t matter how happy he’d been to see her, because now it was weird. Worse than weird, awkward. And it felt more than a little bit awful, because as soon as he’d said it, it’d been a lie. Biggest damn crush on her, yeah, right. It hadn’t been a crush in years. She wasn’t the kinda girl you knew for six years and only ever just had a crush on.

There was a sign in the locker room. In  _a_ locker room, just in the one. It was plain white, hand lettered. It had been placed beneath the security camera. It had been there for as long as Scout could remember. It said in large, thick, block letters, “Miss Pauling is Off Limits”. He hadn’t known who she was the first time he saw it. No one knew who had put it there. He was the only one who ignored it.

Maybe it was there for a good reason.

Miss Pauling sat in the middle of her little nest of cushions, now wrapped in a heavy cotton moving blanket. She’d given back his jacket and now it smelled like her, which even after two weeks and neither of them having showered—somehow still wasn’t bad. Girls were magic. She had turned on her little camp stove and was heating up something to eat, just sitting quietly, collecting herself. She looked a lot better, a lot less unraveled. Fuckin’ teleporters. Maybe that was something to say.

“Took me ages to get used to ‘em. The teleporters. They’re a million times worse now, too. Different every time.”

“Mmm.”

There was a lamp on the floor, in the middle. Miss Pauling had arranged all the desks in the office into a little fort, surrounding her cushion nest and her car battery stove/lamp arrangement. It was probably all a fire hazard, but it kept the light in, kept it from being too obvious out the windows, maybe. Not the sort of thing he would have thought of. She had opened one of the innumerable cardboard boxes that were stacked along the back wall of the office, and was leafing through it, papers everywhere. Scout circled the outside of her little fortress a few times, slowly, in the sort of awkward mood that left him completely uncertain what to do with his shotgun. He slung it over his shoulder. Carried it. One hand, then both. Damned thing.

She pushed the papers away and looked up. “I wish I could say I can’t concentrate with you pacing like that, but I can’t concentrate anyway.”

“Sorry.” He sat on the edge of one of the desks and swung his legs up to sit on top. Still awkward. Damn it all.

“You’ve been quiet.” Miss Pauling smiled. “I’ve been listening to myself think for the past two weeks. I need to catch up on…well, everything. It’s all been such a mess and I made a huge mistake…augh. Forget it. I just need to take my mind off it for a bit. Clear my head.”

“Well. With the teleporters…”

Her hand swung up and she shuddered. “No more about the teleporters. I’ll unsnarl all  _that_  after I’ve eaten something. And maybe slept.”

“Umm. Right, okay.” Again with the silence. Eight or ten or twelve hours of it had been bad enough, just all on his own. Even with sleeping. He had an easier time sleeping during the day—and a much easier time, now that he’d known that Miss Pauling was safe. It had been driving him crazy. Although now, he realized, she hadn’t actually been safe.  _She_  had spent half a day in some sort of teleporter limbo. She seemed none the worse for wear for it—not that she would have been, as far as he knew—but it was still unsettling. He wanted her back with the other mercs, where she’d be safe.

“You should’ve checked it was me,” Miss Pauling volunteered, filling the gap in the conversation. “Downstairs. I mean…I was kinda panicky and I know I spooked you. But…with the robots. They have your voices. Maybe mine too. Probably mine too. It only worked on me once, but it was almost enough.”

Well, that was your basic nightmare. If they had her laugh, he was just a goner. “Christ. This is pretty much awful. How’d they…I mean, it’s clever, an’ all. But, I mean, so’re you. We didn’t even know they were doin’ that. How’d you find out?”

Pauling sighed and pulled her knees up to her chest beneath her blanket, folding herself up and resting her chin on her arms. “You know how Heavy has a nickname for me?”

“Sure. Uh, Ma-something. Russian, I guess.”

“Matroyshka. It’s those little Russian dolls, the ones that sit inside each other. I found a set, at a flea market a couple years ago, I gave them to him for a present. He says it means ‘little matron’.” She shrugged and stared at the lamp, broodingly. “I heard it. It was maybe a week ago, I was still sort of wandering around. I’d almost caught up when I realized it had sounded the same each time. Same tone, same cadence, just repeating. Just a recording. I bolted and then I holed up here. There’s a lot of ground to cover, but they really have us hemmed in. Not a lot that’s useful out this way. Coal Town, Big Rock. This damn place. I wish you guys had pulled back to the factory. There’s more room, it’s better fortified.”

“Plenty of quicklime for easy disposal of all our unlucky carcasses.”

Because  _that_  would lighten the mood.

“Yes, and that. Nine neat little graves for my boys.” She smiled, though. Scout didn’t actually have a particularly dark sense of humour, but Pauling certainly did. Still, she tinted it with optimism, somehow. “No, it won’t come to that. You all are the best in the world at what you do, we’ll get out of it.”

“What we do best is kill  _each other_. This is another league.” Scout shook his head and the sentiment got away on him. “No…I mean, I’m glad you gotta good attitude about it. But it’s tough, and I think maybe you ain’t seen them really in action. We are damn outclassed. If they hadn’t stopped where they did, we’d all be putrefyin’ in the dirt by now. I don’t know why they stopped. Can’t even begin to figure it out, it scares the hell outta me. Big damn ring of ‘em.  _They_  scare the hell outta me. They don’t  _need_ to stop. Don’t get tired, don’t get hungry, don’t get scared. Don’t get killed, just broken. They ain’t cold, and they ain’t stuck out here, they’re here because someone wants ‘em to be. Someone’s tellin’ ‘em what to do. Wish to god someone was tellin’  _us_ what to do. I ain’t got the first damn idea.”

She stared at him with big, earnest green eyes, and Scout looked away, toying with the rivets on the wooden handle of the shotgun, sat across his lap. “There’ll be something. I…I’m here because it’s where I was told to go. This warehouse. There’s  _something_ here, Scout, and I’m right on the edge of finding it. I can’t say much, I have to put it all together, still. But we’ll work it out. I had to come back, I bailed out too soon. I had just the tiniest glimpse of what I need to do, and then I just turned right around. I didn’t know the teleporters were broken, I thought I could get right back. I thought it would still be daylight here, I thought I would have more time. I didn’t know you’d stayed. I still don’t really understand why you did. But I’m glad you’re here. I’m scared, too.”

Oh what the hell. So it was awkward. It had been awkward for years, he just hadn’t ever felt the stakes were this high. Maybe there was a silver lining in the whole robot apocalypse of a mess. “…yeah, you know. I ain’t _that_ scared. I’m glad you ain’t alone out here. You oughta get some sleep, though, if we still got stuff to do here when it gets light.”

Miss Pauling rubbed at her eyes beneath her glasses in response, and yawned. “That’s true. But…I don’t know. We could talk awhile. Do you mind? I’ve been alone for two weeks, I’m kind of losing my mind. We could trade a couple more questions.” She smiled again. “Still nothing about teleporters.”

“What I wanna know ain’t got the first thing to do with teleporters.” Hell. Hell, goddamn and shit. Six years of this, and she’d been lovely and sweet and perfect the whole time. And she could kill a man six ways from Sunday and she dug graves and buried bodies for a living and still managed to be chipper and adorable. So for a few years it had just been the way he always was with girls, because hey, sometimes it worked. But six years in, there just weren’t any other girls on the radar anymore. The occasional fling in town always left him feeling guilty. So, what the hell. End of the world.

“So, um. We went out one time. Right? I didn’t imagine that? Call a spade a spade, my ma always said. I had fun, thought you did, too. Why’d we never do that again?”

A long, long silence. “Oh, hell.”


	7. Macabre Equivalent of Doing her Laundry

Hell. Oh hell. So it wasn’t strictly true that she had never given any particular thought to her relationship with Scout. The more technical truth was that she needed to be very strict about keeping all her thoughts from being about her relationship with Scout in particular. Semantics. Why had they never gone out again? Where to start?  It was a long list. It was a list she had to recite like a mantra if she ever caught herself staring at him with his shirt off. It was a list with multiple layers, like those little Russian dolls.

Well, on the surface of it, probably it wasn’t allowed. She’d scoured her contract and she’d scoured his contract and then she had cross referenced all the other mercs to make sure. Okay, so it wasn’t explicitly prohibited. But that was a shaky defense at best, and better safe than sorry.

Anyway, it was unprofessional. That was something true about workplace relationships. They didn’t work, how could they? Never mind that all she ever did was work, so where else was there, exactly, to have a relationship? This was her first real workplace, but she’d had a couple relationships. She was not great at them. Trying to muddle through another one in the midst of this job would be next to impossible. Besides, she was a career-oriented woman. Professional.

A professional who frequently smelled like corpses. This was the problem with dead bodies, if you hauled around enough of them, eventually you got used to the smell. Such that maybe you didn’t even notice that you were the reason the people at the grocery store were wrinkling their noses. And gagging. Was what she did even a profession? If Miss Pauling were to call her parents and say she had taken a job as a ‘cleaner’, her mother would have an apoplectic fit. Never mind that her mother would assume that she meant she was cleaning toilets. The first time she had needed to roll a bloated, tarp-wrapped carcass into a shallow grave, she had spent two hours in the shower at the end of the day, scrubbing and shivering, long after the water had run cold. She had gone to bed that night with the reek of decay still clinging in her nostrils. Now she had her regimen in the shower down to a slick fifteen minutes, and knew how to come out of it smelling like lavender. But still. Who wanted to date a girl who smelled like corpses.

And Scout was dumb. Well, no. Less dumb than she thought. She had learned that it was easy to oversimplify the mercs, but very, very unwise. Heavy had the most subtle and complex mind of anyone she’d ever met, if you could get him talking. Miss Pauling suspected that it wasn’t that his English wasn’t good enough to express his thoughts. It was that English wasn’t up to the task. They were all like that. If you could separate him from the veneer of drunkenness, Demo was an obsessive expert in his field. She’d watched him compound explosives, his hands steady and precise. Engineer was a physicist (among other things) by merit of brilliance and years of study. Scout was a physicist by merit of the way he moved through the world with an innate, natural understanding of how fast he could go and how far he could jump and whether or not he would stick the landing. The three body problem in Scout’s parlance was his body, the other guy’s body, and whatever he was trying to hit him with. He moved the same way Heavy spoke Russian, like it was his native language.

So okay, he was gorgeous. In a way she had never known about, growing up in all-girls Catholic boarding schools, there just weren’t any boys around until she went home in the summer. Then it was all carefully curated social functions and the boys she had run into were from her same social circle, elegant and coiffed, plump and pampered, polished and entitled. Bastards. Marriages her parents were trying to make, regardless of what she wanted. But she’d had it drilled into her head from childhood that she was looking for a certain kind of husband. Not that she’d spoken to her parents in years, or that she even wanted a husband. They had done their damage, though, and she couldn’t shake the conviction that she was better than Scout, could do better.

Yes, so they had gone out, that one time. This was the core of the problem. Mostly she had finally given in to get him to stop asking. And it wasn’t a date. Because it had been work. It had been a scrubby job, mostly she brought him along to carry things. The entire back of her truck, loaded with boxes of shredded paper. And… other things. Apparently this was all incriminating enough that it also needed to be driven out into the desert and burned, then buried. Also a bag of her clothes, bloodied or worse and beyond salvaging. It was boring. Her macabre equivalent of doing her laundry. Scout was supposed to get bored.

Scout wasn’t supposed to bring a picnic. Or a pair of old gloves and a ball and an attitude of complete and utter shock that she hadn’t ever tossed a baseball around before. He wasn’t supposed to be sweet and funny and easy to talk to. Having work in common was a blessing in disguise, there was no need for any artifice about the fact that they both killed people for a living. She didn’t have to shrug and say, “oh, just a secretary.” Sitting in the back of her truck while the sun set, with a cheerfully blazing bonfire and surprisingly good conversation, it was  _nice_. If Scout was good at one thing (and if she was honest, he was good at a lot of things), he was good at talking. How had she not seen that coming?

So she had put it out of her mind, said good night, let it fizzle away. Because the worst of it was, even if all the other reasons were terrible, it was true that she lied to him for a living. To all of them, of course, and it was just the job, and something told her that it was the mercs’ type of professionalism to understand, even to expect that. She hadn’t told any of them why she was out here, nor would she. She wasn’t even sure there was a reason not to. She had just done it from habit. But how could that work? When despite everything they had in common, there were still going to be times like these. Long, unfair silences, when she couldn’t give him the truth and hated to have to fill the emptiness in with lies.

But she did, finally. “Oh, hell.”

It had apparently been a long enough silence that he regretted asking. “Look, never mind. I ain’t tryin’ to push you about it. S’just…I dunno, Miss Pauling. Known you a long time, I thought… It didn’t have to be a  _thing_ , y’know? You just work such a hell of a lot. I get that, honest, my ma had three jobs at once when I was growin’ up. I thought we could have fun. You oughta have more fun, Miss Pauling.”

"I did have fun," she answered, the truth slipping away before she could catch it. "I did, and I never thanked you. We never did it again because… Scout, it isn’t fair. I work too much, I don’t have time. This job is just _everything_. And I love it, I do, I’m good at it. It’s fun in its own way. But, if we were going to do anything, how could it go anywhere? Between what you do and what I do, how could we have a fair chance? I guess that’s why.”

He had been quiet, serious up until now. She had thought it was just the whole situation, she’d never seen the mercs in the middle of a scenario like this. Maybe things were bad enough that even Scout could be serious. But he looked up at her now, with a shadow of a smile in his eyes. “So I didn’t screw anything up. You’re sayin’ the timin’s just bad. We could maybe do it again sometime.”

“I don’t know when the timing will be better,” she hazarded. “We could do it again, sometime. Maybe. I don’t know, Scout, maybe when this is all over.”

“Yeeeeah, I was thinkin’ more like Friday?”

Well, this was more like him, anyway. Miss Pauling smiled, in spite of herself. “Friday. Do you even know what today is?”

“D’you?”

“It’s Wednesday. I always know what day it is, that’s my job.”

"So… you mean like Saturday."

Incorrigible, now. Hell. Oh hell. She would never admit how much she loved to be flirted with. It was lucky it didn’t stop him that she never flirted back, because she was terrible at it. “We won’t get back by Saturday.”

“You say you’ll go out with me Friday, we will be back  _tomorrow_.” Scout grinned at her now, and even if they were less than a quarter of a mile from a cordon of killer robots, apparently that wasn’t what had made him seem quiet. “You think I’m kidding, hell, I will fight every damn robot we run into, ain’t even gonna slow me down. Go to sleep! We gotta get an early start tomorrow. Friday, right?”

Miss Pauling glanced at her watch. It hadn’t kept time to reflect the twelve hours she had spent in between teleporters. So maybe she didn’t really know what day it was. “Well, today might be Thursday now.”

"Miss Pauling, don’t you go weaseling your way outta this. Deal’s a deal. Gimme something to look forward to besides gettin’ murdered by robots."

He had swung list long legs over the edge of the desk he perched on. That damn crooked smile. And somehow it was nice again, curled up in the middle of a dusty, abandoned warehouse, with the lamplight and a blanket and surprisingly, shockingly good company. Never mind about the robots. Pauling smiled back. “Okay. Friday. Maybe I could use something to look forward to, too.” 


	8. Down with a Vengeance

“Okay. _Now_ we need to talk about the teleporters.”

The November chill had turned into more of a November bite, and her breath hung in faint clouds when she spoke. This was said standing over the teleporter in the warehouse, the one that she had come back through about six hours prior. It was still well before dawn, but the grey light in the warehouse proper was enough to see by, and now Miss Pauling was impatient. She had eaten and she had slept and she had cross referenced her way through the manifests in the office, and found a crate that contained some warmer clothes. Scout wished they had had her with them in the first place, the scavenging the mercs had done on their own had been directionless smashing and grabbing. Mostly of bullets and food. They were in far greater danger of running out of food than bullets, but stockpiling ammo made everyone feel a bit better.

"Specifically, we need to talk about  _this_  teleporter. I need this teleporter, and I need you to help me find where it was. Engineer said it was in a crate when he came through?”

There were two broad aisles in the warehouse proper, lined with shelves each as tall as Scout was, twice his height in total. They were packed with pallets and crates and god knew whatall. Engie had said the teleporter they had come through had been packed in a box.

Scout hadn’t given it serious thought at the time, but now it made his chest tighten, the thought of coming through and being trapped in a wooden crate, packed amid hundreds of others. It could have been smack in the middle of the whole mess. Luckily it had been at the edge of one of the shelves. Engie had been able to kick one of the walls out and clamber down. Scout shuddered. He put it out of his mind and nodded. “Yeah. Uh. He kicked his way out, shouldn’t be hard to find. Look, if you want my opinion an’ I don’t blame you if you don’t… the less we use these things the better. Spy still ain’t back, far as I know.”

Miss Pauling had crouched and was attempting to discern how the teleporter folded back into itself, but she looked up at this. “Wait. What?” Her eyes had widened. “Start from the beginning. Did you all pull back to the museum through the teleporter?”

"Kinda. Oh hell, Miss Pauling, it was messy. The last announcement we got said to hold the line. Then just static and then it went dead. Never mind that there ain’t a line, and if there had been we’d already lost it. The teleporter we  _did_ have stopped working. Something the robots did when they started up with the perimeter. Engie had to build another one, an’ he and Sniper’d run back to get us a new line out, we were just trying to keep it together long enough that we could all bail in one piece.” Scout had to pause for a few moments, collecting his thoughts. It had been two weeks ago, but it had been a bad day and his memory of it was patchy. “It wasn’t like how it usually goes. I know we got a weird job, me an’ the team, but it’s got  _rules_. If this is some kinda war, there aren’t any rules to it that I can see. God, I don’t remember a lot of it. There were about a million of ‘em where we got pinned down. Umm. Was that damn decoy base Soldier built. Worked a bit too damn well.”

“Tell me what happened with Spy.”

Scout hesitated. It wasn’t going to sound good. Even when he replayed it all in his head, it was a jagged mess, all mixed up and out of order. “Listen, I ain’t the guy you want to explain this. It got away from me. I dunno about how the teleporters are busted, I don’t see how it’s gonna help.”

Miss Pauling chewed her lower lip, in a way that was adorable. She looked a little concerned. “It doesn’t need to help. And I’m not saying that I think it _won’t_ , it’s just all right if it doesn’t. I just want to know what happened.”

“I really don’t remember. Got shot, I think. I mean, I  _know_ I did, got the scar, kept the bullet. S’crazy, six years of getting shot at, first time I ever had a bullet left in me. Respawn usually fixes that. Soldier says it’s lucky, but he’s got a plate in his head and I don’t think he’s any luckier than the rest of us. Umm. Backup teleporter came online. I think Demo’d had it worse than me, they put him through first. Umm, then Medic. His medigun had something go wrong with it, was why we were pulling out in the first place. Spy, next. I don’t think he got hit, but Medic said he was gonna need an extra pair of hands to help Demo, so Spy went. Then I think Pyro pulled me up, put me through. But he was already there at the other end. I think. I mean, I don’t remember. We all had to work it out after we had the place fortified. After they had, I mean, when I got through it was two days after Engie and Medic got the field online. Pyro was there. I blacked out a while. I don’t remember when.”

Pauling was staring at him now, face blank. It had all come out a little faster than he meant it to, and sounded worse than he expected. “That was…muddled.”

Scout shrugged. “I said it was messy. Point is, we ended up on the other end all outta order. Engie’s got it down, he can tell you the details. I think Demo went through okay, but after that it all went screwy. Uh. Maybe before that. When Demo got through, Heavy was already there. Then Medic showed up. Then Soldier, maybe three hours later. Pyro, next day. Then me. An’ it’s been two weeks an’ Spy still ain’t back. It’s why I had to stay, Miss Pauling. Dell did some tests, worked out some math about it. Four of us is as many as can go through at a time, and after that, the teleporters go way outta whack. Engi says he can recalibrate them, and he tinkers around with ‘em each time to get ‘em stable, but until Spy comes back, he can’t put them all back offline again and fix ‘em properly. They’re interferin’ with each other somehow.”

Miss Pauling seemed absolutely staggered by this, and more than a little dismayed. Scout wished he hadn’t had to be the one to tell her. “Wow. Okay. I didn’t know about that. I’m sorry, Scout, I should have found you guys sooner. We need to figure this out.” She had successfully managed to work out the teleporter closure, and now she shut it tight and sat down on top of it with a heavy sigh.

Earlier in the morning, Miss Pauling  had scrounged a pair of thick canvas overalls, cuffed and rolled until she no longer tripped on them, and boots that needed to be stuffed with socks in order for her feet to fit. A comically large woolen sweater. Winter came slowly to the Badlands, but when it hit, it bore down with a vengeance. Scout had laughed when she’d come out of the office, because it was just so incongruous to see neat, sensible Miss Pauling dressed like a coal miner from the forties. At least now she looked warm.

But she also looked small, swallowed up in something too big for her. Smaller than Scout thought of her, anyway, diminished somehow by weariness and the worried expression she had worn since she’d woken up. She was a petite woman, but Scout hadn’t ever known anyone half as clever and competent, and she’d always  _seemed_ a thousand feet tall. He sat down on the ground next to her as she buried her face in her hands, afraid she was crying and unsure what to do until she spoke. Even as bowed as she was by the weight of what she’d learned, her voice was still firm, convicted. “She sent me out here, too. The Administrator. My truck broke down, I was trying to call the office and let her know I’d be late getting back. I think she did something to my alternator. Had something done to my alternator, she wouldn’t do it herself. There’s an old checkpoint between here and Big Rock, I went to use the phone. She was already on the line when I picked up, she told me to hide. To get to the warehouse. This place.”

“D’you know what we’re looking for?”

“This teleporter. And anything else that can tell me why.”

“She didn’t say?”

Miss Pauling shook her head and sighed. She pushed herself up and nudged the teleporter with her foot. “It’s heavy and we have to haul it all the way back. But it’s important, it’s all I’ve got to go on. Maybe it’ll help us get out. Maybe…I don’t know. I need to talk to Engie.  To all of you. God, I’ve made mistakes. I think I’ve wasted a lot of time.”

There was a new worst part of the whole thing, and it was seeing Miss Pauling like this. “Hey,” he said, getting to his feet and putting a friendly hand on her shoulder. It didn’t even need to be about how stupidly he was in love with her, that had been put on hold until Friday. For now, other things were more important. “Best in the world at what  _you_ do, too. Right? We’ll get out of it.”

That silver lining, though. Apparently there could be a best part of the whole thing, too, and it was when she looked up and a little of the tiredness seemed to fade from her eyes when she smiled at him. “Working with you, I guess I have to be. Come on. Let’s find that crate and get the hell out of here.”


	9. Interlude - Twenty hours, Six Minutes

The teleporter bzzt’d in the basement of the museum. It was early, early morning. Just dawn. Engi felt like there was a balloon in his stomach, slowly inflating and deflating, but he was an old hand at teleporters, and ignored it. Then sun was coming up outside, the light of it seeped through the gaps in the floorboards overhead.

Pyro clicked the stopwatch and displayed it. “ ~~ **Twenty hours, six minutes.**~~ ”

Dell Connagher was a soft-spoken man. He held open doors, tipped his hat to ladies, and used the word ma’am. If he could be made mad enough to curse a blue streak, straits had gotten dire.

When he had finished, he put his hands on his hips and frowned at Pyro. “Who went back through?”

“ ~~ **Pauling. She didn’t know any better, you should’ve warned her.**~~ ” Pyro made a curvaceous gesture in the air with his hands. “ ~~ **Did you want to get in on the pool about whether or not she’n Scout’ll be knocking boots by the time they get back?**~~ ”

“I need to see the record you got. Spy ain’t come through either, I take it.”

Pyro shrugged and handed over a small notepad, with crude notes taken in dark pencil. “ ~~ **Not through here, anyway.**~~ ”

“I gotta get everyone up. Pack up what gear we can carry, leave the teleporter. I got a hunch we gotta bug outta here. We gotta be gone by noon, we need to get somewhere we can really dig in. Big Rock, if we can make it, the Factory as a fallback.”

“ ~~ **Scout and Miss Pauling will get back and we’ll be gone. We better write up a note.**~~ ”

Engineer had already left. He didn’t seem to have heard. Pyro pocketed the stopwatch, and went to fetch paper and pen.


	10. Top-Secret Dossier of Horrible Portent

“You could call me Edith. You know, if you wanted.”

It was the first thing she’d really said since they’d left the warehouse. Since she’d insisted that they needed to hurry, that they couldn’t take the mineshafts, that they had to get back to the others as soon as possible. Since they’d found the crate, and she’d found the file.

Not really a file. More than a file, more of a dossier. Old, a little cracked and faded. She had opened it, and the paper had felt dry, rougher than what she was used to handling in the office. She had skimmed the first page. She had needed to sit down. She had thumbed through the second, the third, the fourth. She had stared blankly at a diagram that she only barely grasped the structure of. Three were only ten pages in total. Then she had remembered Scout was watching her, and snapped the whole thing closed, numbed.

Miss Pauling had bitten her lip as hard as she could without breaking the skin, to try and focus her mind. And then she’d had to tell him what to do. “We need to go. Now. Forget the mineshafts, we’ll have to take our chances, straight to the museum, we need the others. Everybody.  _Do not_ read this file. Do not ask me about it. Forget you even saw it. I should burn it, but I can’t, I need it. I wish I hadn’t had to read it, but   it’s my job and anyway it’s too late now. If I get killed on the way back to the team, burn this file. Then burn  _me_. Then get the others and find the way out and  _run_. And I know you don’t understand why, and I can’t  _tell_ you, but it has to happen. If you can’t do it—with it being  _me_ , I mean—then get Pyro to, but for god’s sake, if this all goes wrong, make sure it gets done.”

And that had been the last thing she’d really said. She had expected to need to fight with Scout about it, none of the things she’d asked were things that seemed like they would come easily to him.

But apparently her tone had been enough to convey how much it mattered, because the last thing he’d really said had been, “Jesus. Okay.”

If their roles had been reversed, and he’d asked her to burn into obliteration his freshly dead body and the top-secret dossier of horrible portent for which he’d died, she would have felt terrible about it, but it would be all in a day’s work. She wasn’t even sure Scout knew how to completely torch a body. She made a mental note to write up a cheat sheet.

Now it was just terse instructions and acknowledgements, bursts of short movement from cover across open ground, then brief rests. The badlands were a ramshackle sprawl of abandoned and semi-abandoned settlements, half used for storage, the other half used for occasional research and development projects. Across the open gaps between buildings, sometimes a low, distant wall of grey was visible. At night it flickered with eerie blue light. They wouldn’t be out late enough to see it.

The problem wasn’t the robots on the perimeter. Pauling had given them a wide berth, true, but from what she had been able to observe, they had more or less established themselves as an immovable wall, daring the mercs to try and get out. It wasn’t entirely clear why they’d surrounded the area that they had—not to the mercs, anyway, Miss Pauling had had her suspicions. These had been confirmed and more than confirmed. The problem, what had cut short all of the flirting and playful banter, was that going overland they would risk running into roamers.

It wasn’t even that the roamers were that bad, on their own. One robot, they weren’t  _that_ tough. They were slow and they weren’t clever, just durable. Miss Pauling on her own had taken down several, she had learned to be wary, but had stopped being overly frightened. There weren’t really even all that many of them, not counting the ones on the perimeter, and if she and Scout were careful they would have no problem avoiding any risky encounters. Even if they ran afoul of one or two patrols, it wouldn’t be more than they could handle. It was if they were swarmed that things would get bad, and that was what Scout seemed to be concentrating on. With good reason, obviously. But there was a lot of ground to cover, Pauling struggled with the deep, internal fear that there wasn’t really time to be cautious anymore, but Scout was insistent. The cordon of robots were waiting for something. The roamers were  _looking_  for something, and she had beaten them to it.

It slowed them down. The need for caution. They had left with the sun beginning to melt the frost that clung to the ground and the buildings, but it would be late in the day, nearing noon before they reached the museum. It was a ludicrous amount of time to take to cover three miles, but the mineshafts would have taken longer. Scout was meticulous about the ground they covered, true to his job title. He roamed ahead and circled around, climbing to better vantage points. At points he left her for as long as half an hour, and she would hear distant gunfire before he came back, looking grim and with his shotgun smoking.   All while carrying the teleporter. She’d been reminding herself that they were all a lot stronger, a lot tougher than she thought, and that it helped no one when she forgot that, but still. The thing was heavy and almost as important as the dossier, which Miss Pauling had tucked inside her overalls, beneath her sweater, for lack of a better place.

Scout called a halt, just past nine in the morning, inside an old barn, and for all her impatience with the time it was taking, Pauling realized that the pace he’d set was a lot harder on him than it was on her. He’d covered probably four times as much ground as she had over the course of the morning. He shrugged out of the makeshift sling he was carrying the teleporter with, just a thick canvas strap, looped across his chest so he could carry it at his hip. He didn’t stop, just paced slow, deliberate laps around the inside of the barn, evening out his breathing and cooling down. He still hadn’t said much of anything, unless he was telling her “stay” or “wait” or “okay, let’s go.” It mattered, he was doing his job, and she listened.

Now with a lull of silence between them, Pauling didn’t know what to say. She hadn’t expected it to get so difficult, so suddenly. She hadn’t really seen any of the other mercs since the start of this, would they all be so different? It had been a relief—an enormous relief, and it was beginning to seem more important to be honest with herself about it—when Scout had found her. Of course it would’ve been Scout. She had chosen to be alone when the whole mess had started, had thought she needed to be, hadn’t known how it would be hard.

And as long as she was being honest, in the last twenty-four hours—it couldn’t have been as little as twenty-four hours? A robot apocalypse, and then two weeks and twenty-four hours, and the silly, stupid, inconvenient crush she had just wasn’t just a crush anymore. And that was better in some ways, and worse in others.

So she’d said the only thing she could think to say, and Scout stopped and looked up.

“Why would I wanna call you Edith?”

Pauling blushed and shrugged. The worse part of this was that now she felt shy, awkward. Now there was something at stake. “Well, it’s my name. Edith Amelia Pauling.”

"So, not on account of how you’re secretly a ninety year old lady. Because, y’know. Edith." He grinned at her and the slow dawn of honesty let her admit that it was the best feeling in the world, even if she was sitting on a moldy hay bale in an abandoned barn, wearing thirty year old surplus mining overalls and stupid boots that made her feet hurt. "I ain’t gonna call you Edith, Miss Pauling."

"O-oh. Well…"

"Edie, though. Yeah, Edie. I like that better. Suits you. You wanna go dancin’ tomorrow, Edie? You owe me a date, an’ I’m the best thing on two legs at dancin’."

And suddenly Friday couldn’t come soon enough.


	11. Too Many Variables

_Edie._  Edie, Edie, Edie. E.D. Wait, no, not that one. Ha, no, definitely not that one. Edith, Edith Amelia. But Edie, though, never DeeDee, not like that old crabby woman his ma played bridge with. What had happened to her anyway, she had been a bit of a hag, flicking cigarette ash on the floor. Maybe she had died. Never DeeDee. Edith. Edie.

Edith, origin: Old English. Prosperous in War, Saint and a queen and a daughter of kings. Amelia: Industrious. Scout didn’t know any of this, but he would’ve believed it.

Edie.

And she was  _not_ going to die and he was  _not_ going to burn her and neither was Pyro or anybody else and fuck that stupid file she carried and also all the rest of it. They were going dancing on Friday, even if it was only in the Visitor’s Centre and even if the only music they had was from a tinny novelty jukebox that played the Mann Mining Anthem ( _We will mine all the coal/From here to Dustbowl/Now get the hell back to work_ ), because she had laughed and smiled and said she didn’t really know how, but she would try.

Scout knew how to dance. And he knew how to drop from the second storey of a building and land so he mostly didn’t regret it, but it was a lot trickier when he had to land on a robot and still not regret it.

He was mad, though. Mad as hell. There was an assumption that tended to get made about Scout, which was that he had a temper. This was somewhat reasonable, being that he was loud and mean and aggressive and hit people in the face with a baseball bat for a living. That was less a matter of temper and more a matter of that was his job and that was how he did it and also that it was fun. Generally, Scout considered himself to be fairly easygoing, it just didn’t  _look_ like it.

When he  _was_ mad, he just got quiet and violent and fast. And he got grim and he got terse and actually he kind of hated to be mad. Four hours combing the way back to Coal Town for robots. You could almost feel sorry for the robots he found.

This one was a Bowman. Sniper had named them all. Apt, anyway. Scout didn’t even bother with the shotgun. Because why should she have to ask what she had? She shouldn’t, but she did, and he needed to take that out on somebody. Something.

Scout landed with both feet, accounting for the fact that a hundred-and-sixty-five pounds of him didn’t go as far against robots as it did against people, even with an extra thirty pounds of teleporter to help. It was more of a crunch than the meaty crack of a ribcage beneath his feet that he was used to. They weren’t really so tough. Their heads popped right off, if you knew where to grab hold. There were just so damn many of them.

Four thousand, one hundred and forty-six. That’d been Engi’s math, based on the segment of the perimeter he had gone to see, and he’d done the calculations twice. Of course, he made it explicitly clear that there were too many variables, and it was still only a rough idea. If there could be a way for Scout to take them one by one, he would do it, if in the bargain it would roll things back to a time before Miss Pauling had found the stupid file. Line them up, watch him go.

Edie, though. Not Miss Pauling.

There were things in this world that would get him killed, and one of them was running out to that damn wall of robots, and trying to get them to form an orderly queue so he could knock every last damn one of their freakin’ heads off.

Scout didn’t want to be killed in the world where he was also a member of a very exclusive club of people who got to call Miss Pauling ‘Edie’.

So the Bowman got stomped on more than was strictly necessary. It was smashed and sparking when he pulled its head off, tossed it in the air, and nearly cracked it in half with his bat. Metal on metal. He preferred wood. He was nothing if not a traditionalist. But he broke wooden bats too often for them to be a good investment.

Scout stood over the broken robot for maybe an extra minute, fuming. Longer than he should have, if he’d left Edie on her own. Through the rigour of it, though—through the fact that it was taking a hell of a lot out of him to be this thorough, to have to work this hard to keep her safe—it still made him smile to think of her name. Nobody else knew her name. And he wasn’t gonna be able to keep it to himself, once they were back, it couldn’t be something he only called her in private, because who knew how often they were going to get any privacy? Or if they even ever would, maybe this whole thing wasn’t ever going to go anywhere  _private_. He’d either have to share it with the others, or go back to calling her Miss Pauling. It was going to be a hard decision.

Edith Amelia Pauling. Five feet, four inches tall. A Virgo. Fantastic in purple. Knew how to drive a manual. Pretty. God, so pretty. And a little bit twisted, a little bit macabre. But clever and brave and sweet. Complicated. How in the hell was he ever going to be good enough for a girl who was _complicated_. But she talked fast when she got excited, they had that in common. Bared her teeth when she was mad, got bored of classical music. Made fun of Spy behind his back. Made fun of  _all_ of the mercs behind their backs. Muddled up in a job that was big and difficult and the first real job she’d had, but still she was doing the best she could. Hadn’t she told him that, once? When? Maybe it was just something he knew about her. More and more in common.

Perfectly capable of taking care of herself for a few more minutes. Hell, she’d been alone for two weeks, and maybe just the thought of it’d nearly killed  _him_ , but she was none the worse for wear. The Bowman had been up an old water tower. Scout had lured him down, then jumped him. Dumb damn bots. They couldn’t be more than a half mile from Coal Town, and the sun hadn’t yet reached its zenith. There was a broad, open expanse to cross, and then they’d be on the outskirts, practically home free. If he could get a good look up ahead, maybe they could make the last leg of the trip at a reasonable pace. Get back, get food. Make up his mind about whether she was going to be Edie or Miss Pauling. Figure out Friday.

Climbing was easy. Three storeys of wooden stairs had collapsed below the tower, but the scaffolding was sturdy enough to climb. He had to be a bit careful, he’d nearly made a disastrous mistake earlier that morning, thrown off by the weight of the teleporter. He had splinters in his fingertips from having to scrabble a hold on the wood of a rickety old ladder. He’d had that heart-pounding moment of falling, but he was quick, and he’d caught himself and it was fine. Scout found himself wondering how the hell the Bowman had gotten up. Maybe the stairs hadn’t always been broken.

It was bright out, clear. November had gotten abruptly serious about being November. The badlands sometimes seemed to forget about winter until the last moment, and when it was remembered, the temperatures plummeted startlingly fast, practically overnight. Maybe if they got snow, it might short all the robots out. Wishful thinking.

There was nothing up ahead. Nothing but Coal Town. Half a mile. It had been the stretch of the trip Scout had worried about most, but unnecessarily. It was open ground, no cover, but they would see any robots coming before they got close enough to be a threat. No big deal. If he and Miss Pauling even did run into any robots, the team might even hear the gunfire.

She was still patiently waiting. Looking back, Scout could see her from the top of the tower, and he had always loved the moments when he could watch her, just a little, without her noticing. He didn’t mean to be creepy, it was just that those were the moments when she was disarmingly, heartbreakingly lovely. Sitting on an old hitching post, swinging her legs. Sometimes she looked young in a way that made him feel a little less self-conscious about being so young himself.

Miss Pauling looked up and waved. She was friendly, had always been friendly—well, shy on her first day, but friendly after that—she’d been waving at him and the other mercs for six years. It was starting to feel different, though. Promising. He leaned a hand on the railing and waved back.

One-hundred-sixty-five pounds him wouldn’t have been enough to splinter and snap the sixty-year-old wood of the railing. The thirty-odd extra pounds of teleporter helped, though.

And again with that moment of falling. A long moment, a lot of moments.

Not Miss Pauling. Edie.

 

Oh, Edie.


	12. The Excuse and Not the Reason

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The following references [Don't Listen](http://archiveofourown.org/works/2523785/chapters/5608124)

Miss Pauling, if you are reading this, then I am dead.

_Miss Pauling, if you are reading this, then I am dead._

_If you are reading this, then I am dead._

_If reading, then dead._

_Reading_ →  _Dead_

Dead _._

But no, she had read that already and she was not reading, she was running. She wasn’t reading, the words just kept playing themselves over in her head, sing-song, variations on a theme. Not reading, not dead. Running, tripping onto her face, over those stupid damn boots. Screaming in sharp pain and fear and frustration. Kicking off the stupid boots, scrambling in the dirt, bruised knees, scraped palms. Nothing, though, nothing.

_Scout, god damn you. Don’t you do this, don’t you dare._

Not dead, couldn’t be dead. There had been a shareholder in Teufort. He had been ferreting around RED’s files. This sort of thing was generally discouraged. She had lured him to the top of the clocktower in town. At three in the morning. It had been laughably easy, she had just called him and said she had information for him and that he was on the right trail. She had worn sunglasses. She had worn a brimmed hat and a trenchcoat. She had brought a file from her desk (the one marked Quarrying Equipment Requisitions/Manifests). She had stood by the edge and pretended to smoke a cigarette. He had joined her. She had kicked him off.

She had still needed to go down and bash his head in with a shovel, and that tower had been twice as tall as this one.

Skidding around a corner, then another thirty feet. Oh, god, this was awful, why was this awful. She had seen much worse, inflicted much worse. She’d become inured to seeing the mercs injured within her first week on the job. It hadn’t even bothered her that much to begin with. Blood, bones, flesh. It was all just part of the scenery now. This wasn’t even bad. She had seen much worse, seen Scout get much worse.

But it was only ever just for a moment. Just a flash of horror and gore, and then they would blink away out of existence and pop back in again, safe and whole and elsewhere, with just enough amnesia to suggest that any brain damage probably wasn’t permanent, but enough of a memory to also be fired up and vengeful. That was the game. That was what the mercs were for.

When Miss Pauling had been young enough to still be Edith Amelia, she had found a bird behind her parents’ house. Her house, her family’s house. It hadn’t been dead, but it had been dying. She didn’t know that. A wing was gone. Half gone, tiny, brittle bones peeked out amid the pinion feathers. Miss Pauling blamed her mother’s cat, because it was exactly the sort of cat that would cruelly maim, but not quite kill. Your average cat.

It had been little and delicate and broken and she had picked it up and tried to be careful. But she was only seven and there were a lot of stairs and by the time she had gotten to her room, it had died. And she had just sat on her bed, holding it in her lap, crying, until her mother had come in. Then her mother had screamed. Then Edith Amelia had been sent to boarding school. It had been a long time before she realized that the bird had been the excuse and not the reason.

She felt like she was seven again. Sometimes she wished she had never found the bird. She was pretty sure she had been a different person before the bird.

She had found Scout, though. Not little, not delicate, but broken. And she wasn’t seven, she was twenty-four, and she had to do something.

When she had been twelve, she had been home for the summer. There had been an attempt to send her to violin camp, but this had fallen through. A trip to Monaco had to be cancelled. This was not her fault, but she felt blamed. Her parents’ home was on a piece of property that sprawled back onto an apple orchard. The groundsman’s name was Mr. Applebaum and Miss Pauling had always loved that about him. He had been sixty-five and sweet and friendly, and he had been the last person who called her Edie. He had fallen from a ladder, not more than eight feet off the ground, broken his neck, and died. Her parents had paid for the funeral, but even though she had been the one to hear the crack of the branch and the thud of the body from across the orchard, Edie hadn’t been allowed to go.

Scout hadn’t broken his neck, but she couldn’t tell about his back, and there was definitely either a tibia or a fibula, visible and broken and bleeding. And his arm looked wrong. And a thin line of blood ran from his nose, had beaded into a droplet near his ear. And none of this would bother her, except that he was still breathing. And the difference was enough that she didn’t even want to look at him.

Just a body, just an object. That was her rule, her mantra. The Cleaner’s Prayer. Still breathing. Oh, thank god, still breathing. Too rapid, too shallow. But alive. Except she didn’t know how to help living people. She knew how to get rid of dead people.

_We can’t stay here. I can’t move him. I don’t even know if I can touch him. I can’t leave him. I don’t know what to…_

Oh.

He had landed awkwardly on the teleporter. It twisted him half onto his side. It would assemble itself and come online if reopened. Now, at least, she knew what to do.

She knelt. Once she had needed to drag a nearly three hundred pound man out of an alley and into her truck. It had taken an hour, a handily abandoned skateboard, and a cunning arrangement of ropes and pulleys. He had been hairy and fat and unwashed and not freshly dead. Miss Pauling had sighed, rolled up her sleeves and retrieved her work gloves from the glove compartment. She hadn’t been happy, but she hadn’t flinched. All in a day’s work.

Her fingers trembled when she touched Scout’s cheek, though. And she had gotten plenty of blood on her hands before, and worse, but not like this. His blood, even. Lots of it. She’d ruined a cardigan with it, wiped from her palms on the back of his shirt. And now this tiny drop was somehow worse. How could that be? Clinging in the ridges of her thumbprint as she tried to wipe it off his cheek, smearing it instead. Oh god, why had she bothered. That didn’t help, how would that help. Another slow, dark drop.

"Hey…no, hey. Scout. Please, don’t. Please, it’s me." She was seven, again. That goddamned bird. "Scout? Please."

Miss Pauling reached for the handle of the teleporter case. She started to tug, not even enough to move it, just enough to tweak the handle so it swung taut. Scout stirred. She froze. The canvas strap he had carried it by was still twined around his torso.

The way all of him shuddered and the way his body reflexively started to arch away from the ground, before crumpling painfully with an agonized gasp that was mingled with a cry. Then he choked and coughed and tried to breathe, but struggled like he had forgotten how.

He had twisted himself off the teleporter, and Miss Pauling pounced on it, fumbling with the latches and pushing it off of a pile of splintered wood and onto flat ground. It began to whir and hum and she forced her attention back to Scout.

His right arm seemed okay, she took his hand. The palm of it was slick and clammy and shaking, but she couldn’t tell whether this was his pain or her terror. Or both. It stung at the scraped skin of her palm.

"Hey," she said, in her seven-year-old voice. "Hey, it’s okay." Of course it wasn’t okay. Of all the stupid things in the world to say, staring into a pair of slightly unfocused blue eyes. "It’ll be okay."

"Edie."

_Oh god, don’t call me Edie. I don’t want to be Edie again, not now. Don’t try to smile. Scout, don’t. Don’t smile at me like you think I can fix this, because probably I can’t._

But she smiled, too, though her eyes were starting to ache from want of crying. “It’ll be okay. The teleporter, we’ll get back to the team. Medic.”

Don’t be Edie. Be Miss Pauling.

Edith Amelia Ryerson had been dropped off outside of a bus station in Providence, Rhode Island by one of her father’s cars. It had been driven by that one chauffeur she had always hated. She had been handed an envelope containing $200 and forms to change her last name to her mother’s maiden name. Already filled out. She had been expelled from nursing school. Then secretarial school. Then the fourth rate law school her father had finally agreed to let her attend. It had been hard and she had cheated and she had been caught and thrown out. And so, the car outside her dormitory. A stop at a mailbox. A meagre suitcase. The bus ticket to the furthest place she could afford, Teufort, New Mexico. The crummy motel room. The Teufort Reader classifieds.

The teleporter whirled into life.

Miss Pauling could handle this. This was her job. Move a body from one place to another. From somewhere raw and exposed to somewhere safe and hidden. It didn’t matter if it was a body she had never wanted to touch like this, with her hands that had always secretly wished to caress and hold and stroke and cherish. Her hands stopped trembling. Her gestures became brusque and professional. “Okay.” Because it  _would_  be okay. “Scout, this is going to hurt like hell. “

"Oh." That same weak, crooked smirk. God, what a boy to fall in love with. "Oh, ‘cuz it ain’t already."

It would all hinge on his one good arm, and the weight she could bear with the strength in her shoulders. So. No time to waste. They had four feet of ground to cover. Her hand lingered on his face a moment longer, she squeezed his hand.

"It’s going to be okay."


	13. Interlude - Mere de Dieu

Well, clearly they were fucked. Thoroughly and utterly. There had been monsters of metal on one end, and by the sounds of gunfire and the clamour of fighting above, there were monsters of metal on this end as well. Spy lit another cigarette and leaned against the wall. The teleporter was acting up, and he had had the acute sensation of  _la petite mort_. This was irritating, bewildering, and disconcerting even to a man of his history, tastes, and habits. If he would die today, butchered by a thing that was faster and deadlier than he was, then so be it, but it could be later.

There was a sheet of paper posted behind him. It had times marked down, and Pyro’s crude scrawl across it. “ms p and scut gone to bigrock pls kiss when you get. i will win $100”

Spy had long suspected that several of Pyro’s fingers were melted together beneath his gloves. In his opinion this did not excuse the atrocious spelling or the bewildering message.

He would have stayed on the other end, to fight to the death there, but the Medic had called for another pair of hands to help with Demo, who had taken a chunk of shrapnel in his stomach. Spy did not especially object to Demo and didn’t trust any of his ersatz comrades to be of particular use to the good Herr Doctor. Who could tell, they might all pull it off. When he had vanished in the usual flash of light, the last thing he had seen had been Scout, shot in the collarbone, but cursing and returning fire and needing to be restrained by Heavy from clambering over and out of their fortifications and getting into the fight properly. They might make a successful stand of it through sheer violence and stupidity and grit.

On that note, Scout would probably be through any minute. Although…it was the nature of his trade to be observant, suspicious. There was no sign of Medic, or Demo. No trace of blood on the ground, no sign of any spilled viscera. The curious note from Pyro. Overhead, the telltale chorus of Heavy’s minigun, and the loud, vicious sound of his laughter. Surely Heavy had remained behind. Curiouser and curiouser.

Oh, but with a sudden flare of light, there was Scout. He had not evidently been shot, afterall. But he collapsed off the teleporter pad, screaming and bleeding and brokenly sobbing on the dusty, planked floor. Clearly the teleporters were more broken than Spy had realized. He suspected he had been lucky. He flicked his half-smoked cigarette to the floor.

“ _Mon dieu_ , boy, get ahold of yourself, it’s only…” But, with another flare of light, and a sudden better look at the brokenness, at the blood. Spy stopped. In the second flare of light a coal miner from the forties had appeared. The teleporters were terribly, tremendously broken.

“ _Move_ ,” Miss Pauling barked, and dropped to the floor next to Scout. “And where the fuck have you been?”

Spy had always known, or at least been thoroughly convicted, that Miss Pauling was substantially more than the sweet, lovely girl that everyone assumed she must be. Obviously the contract killing and efficient body disposal must be charming quirks that afflicted an otherwise perfectly normal girl. If this was true, then this girl was unrecognizable in the woman crouched on the floor now, carefully but brutally rearranging the limbs of a whimpering, gasping young man, who clung with one hand to the sleeve of her grey, cable-knit sweater. Shifting him so he sat semi upright, leaning against the wall.

Miss Pauling leaned in, tugging a pistol from Scout’s belt, then the shotgun from over his shoulder. Then she cupped a hand on the back of his neck and kissed him, almost sternly. Long and deep with a flash of teeth. Spy had been kissed like that, only once or twice in his life. By people who hadn’t wanted to leave him, but knew that there was no other choice. Once on the banks of the Seine. He suspected— _knew_ , beyond a doubt—that Scout hadn’t ever had the experience. Spy had never seen him look at someone, not even Miss Pauling, the way he looked at her now. The teleporters were clearly broken beyond all human reasoning.

Now Miss Pauling looked up at Spy, sharply, eyes narrowed behind her glasses as she stood up. “You. Help  _him_. I need to go back for something.”

And she leapt back onto the teleporter pad.

 _Mere de Dieu_.


	14. A Less Wasteful Choice

_Edie, don’t. Don’t, no, don’t go, don’t go straight back again. Goddamnit, Edie, not again. Fuckin’ teleporter, we don’t_ need  _it, Edie. Edie,_ stop _. Stay. Edie if we get married I ain’t ever gonna ask that you ‘obey’, but maybe you might at least think about how you are goddamn killin’ me when you do this kinda thing. Edie, for chrissakes. I can’t even—_

But she hadn’t heard him, probably because he hadn’t managed to say it out loud.

Twenty-four hours. Twenty-four hours with Miss Pauling, more in love with her than ever, knowing her better than he had before, and still tasting her lips and also blood because she’d bitten  _him_ on the lip and that was the first time he’d ever known a girl who did that. Hopefully because she’d bitten him, it was very likely that there were other reasons.

And now she was gone. The after image of the flash of the teleporter still burned beneath Scout’s eyelids. He wasn’t sure he could even move.

But at least Spy was there. Scout somehow couldn’t bring himself to be thankful about that, Spy had crouched and was poking and prodding and things went dark for an indeterminate amount of time, a long, unintentional blink.

When he could see again, Spy was taking his belt off. Scout’s belt. Not his own belt. But Scout still had one good arm and one good leg and despite the fact that several of his ribs were broken, he managed to punch Spy in the face.

A torrent of French cursing, and a frustrated shout for Medic. A hand on his throat, of the familiar sort that would clench and crush his windpipe if he wasn’t careful. “You  _idiot_  boy, be  _very_ still or I will be forced to regret what I have to do to you.”

“Get  _off me_ , get  _Edie_.” Adrenaline was starting to unmuddy his thoughts, and she had gone back, and he had to send someone after her.

Spy snorted. “I do not know what that is. You look like you are dying. Or something of that nature, I am not a doctor. Where  _is_  the doctor? I begin to think I will have to find him myself, and I suspect you will need to come with me.” With a smooth, serpentine motion, Spy yanked his belt free. “I last did this for a worthier man than you, who died on the banks of the Seine despite my best efforts. Had I known better how to make a splint then, he would have seen the end of the war, and I would have one more friend in the world today.”

If Spy had meant this to be comforting, Scout hadn’t heard him. The next thing he heard was still Spy, still talking, now busy doing something that was horrendously, unbelievably painful to his left leg, “…would be of course, imprudent to use  _my_ belt, which is six hundred dollar hand-tooled Italian leather, made by a tiny old man who went blind for the sake of his craft. Yours appears to be made from a bicycle tire, a less wasteful choice.”

Scout kicked him in the throat, with the leg he could still move, sent him sprawling backwards on his stupid francophone ass. He spat a mouthful of blood, coppery pennies again, and couldn’t tell if it was from his lip or the back of his throat.  His left pant leg had been cut away below the knee, when had that happened? “The teleporter,  _Miss Pauling_ , you dumb French fuck,  _l_  can’t so  _you_ gotta, don’t you fuckin’ touch me, go back, go  _get her_.”

“ _Merde._ ” If Spy had been attempting to be gentle before, he stopped. A beastly twist of leather, jerking taut, knotting a splintered piece of wood against the suddenly bared, bloodied skin of his leg. A pair of gloved hands gathered the front of his shirt and yanked him bodily off the floor. It was sometimes difficult to remember that Spy was a lot stronger than he looked. Also, extremely irritable. “I haven’t the first idea what is happening. Clearly not what I think. Miss Pauling is the only person who seems to know what is going on, and I do not know where she came from. A coal mine in the nineteen-forties, by all appearances. She says to help you. I will do  _that_ , until a better order presents itself.”

Well, now it was a fight. Not one he was well positioned to win, though on a good day, with the benefits of youth and agility and not a negligible quantity of luck, he could sometimes lay Spy out in a scrappy five minutes, and generally not even be cut up too badly at the end of it.

Predictably, he lost this first round, and on the way up the stairs from the museum basement and through the door of the visitor’s centre, Spy was perhaps less careful than he might’ve been otherwise. The impact of Scout’s hip on the doorframe on the way outside seemed deliberate. Scout shot a hand out and grabbed on, stopping Spy short.

“ _Clearly you have a death wish._ ” Spy dropped him.

When he woke up this time, things had gotten much worse. Too much, now it was too much. The entire world was too bright, and too loud, too full of the sounds of people running and shouting. Every curse that everyone knew was being thrown about in every language and accent available. Familiar sounding gunfire. Familiar sounding regular fire. Pyro. Metallic grating and grinding and above it all, surprisingly, a great deal of laughter. It sounded like fun. Scout was crumpled on his side in a doorway and he was not having fun.

Edie. Edie, half a mile east. Alone, teleporter. Fucking robots everywhere, outta nowhere. How long had it been? Spy was back. The teleporters were broken. Where was the sun? Everywhere, obviously, what was the time?

"Hell an’ christ and good god  _damn_ , Scout, where in all creation did you come from? I saw Spy come bombin’ out, wasn’t lookin’ for you, but he said…”

Engie. It was hard to breathe, Scout wasn’t sure he could talk. It was cold. Engie would listen, though. He had stopped and he was staring. The Texan knelt, Scout felt gloved hands touching his chest, his ribcage. There wasn’t enough breath left in him to muster a scream, just a whimper.

“Doe!” Dell hollered. “I need some cover here! Tavish, back that other truck on over!  _Medic!_ ”

“Edie…” Half of her name was bloody when he said it. “B-back... she went back.”

“Miss Pauling. Scout, you don’t say anything more, let me work it out. You hear that? You keep your mouth shut, you keep breathin’, you trust me. Is Pauling in the basement?”

“N-n…”

The crunch of tires on gravelly dirt. They had a truck, where had they gotten a truck? Miss Pauling’s truck, purple, manual, bad suspension. Not that truck.

“Stop it, son, just stop. She ain’t here. Is she? No. Sent you on, walkin’ back herself, I figure. How far off?”

Close. So close, she could probably hear all of it. Half a mile, really close. He could see her.

Cold metal, flat on his back in the bed of the truck. What truck? Sniper, Medic. Engie, still there, Still gunfire. “She…”

“ _Mein gott_ , still talking.” Medic had a syringe in hand, blood on his sleeves. He had taken Scout’s good arm by the wrist, was tapping the inside of his forearm, looking for a likely vein. “Still, still, danke, a moment more. Morphine, some of my last, perhaps we will see you again when we get to the Big Rock.  _Ja_?”

Scout wrenched his wrist free and smashed the syringe. Shards of glass in his fingertips. In his arm, his leg, his chest. “Miss  _Pauling_. Back. East. Half a mile, back.  _Please_. Can’t, I can’t. Sh-she… _please_.”

“We’ll find her, Scout. Lie still.”

He did.


	15. Interlude - Not a Teleporter

She was walking straight towards them, across the bare, rocky expanse of scrubby semi-desert. She had a pistol in one hand, and carried the teleporter in the other. It was heavy. Dell put his foot further down on the gas pedal. It was an ancient, behemoth of a truck. A storm of dust rose behind them, they had long outdistanced the remnants of the two dozen or so robots who had descended on Coal Town. It had been a miracle they had gotten either truck started. This one had been a museum exhibit. The other had been riddled with bullet holes. That had been less of a problem. Demo drove it, Soldier riding shotgun. Medic, Scout and Sniper in the back. The other vehicle was already bulling its way towards BigRock. Once they had picked up Miss Pauling, they would swing around and join the others.

Spy rode in the cab next to him, smoking Gauloises like a fiend. Engie had explained, as well as he could, about the teleporters. The sort of maudlin existential crisis that seemed to plague the French seemed to be plaguing the spook.

“Crack a window, you’re fixin’ to suffocate the both of us.”

Spy merely exhaled a noxious cloud of blue smoke, and Dell rolled the window down.

They would meet up with Pauling in a few more minutes. She’d come through the teleporters without incident. Almost in perfect time. Dell had to keep his mind on the lack of road ahead of him, but his mind was already knotted up in the problem.

“Will he die, do you think?”

Dell clenched his jaw. “Ain’t kind to speculate. Medic’ll get him. Was already at it like a maniac, back of a movin’ truck, half his kit all busted to hell. Medigun runnin’ at half-power, he’s still a goddamn mad genius. Havin’ the time of his life. Anyone could pull it off, it’d be that goddamn crazy German.”

“Mm. She kissed him.”

In spite of everything, that news made Engi grin. “Well, ‘bout damn time. Poor dumb bastard kid. Been way the hell an’  _gone_ about that girl ever since he met her.”

“I would’ve hoped she had better taste.”

“She could do plenty worse than Scout.”

Miss Pauling had stopped walking towards them. She stood in the middle of the barren badlands now, waiting, a tumbledown old shanty town behind her. She still carried the teleporter, she hadn’t put it down when she’d stopped. They were closing the distance rapidly. Her dark hair was teased over her shoulders by a chilly November breeze. It was cold in the cab of the truck when Engi slowed down and pulled up beside her. He hoped Scout would pull through. He wasn’t likely to ever do better than Miss Pauling.

“Afternoon, ma’am, you goin’ our way?” He had hoped to lighten the mood. Miss Pauling had an expression that could’ve cut glass. It got colder in the cab of the truck. He cleared his throat. “Awful lotta trouble for a teleporter, Miss Pauling.”

She heaved it in through the window, into his lap. “It’s not a teleporter.” She followed it with Scout’s shotgun. “The pump action on this is jammed, the weather’s too cold for it. Fix it for him, please.”

Miss Pauling climbed into the back of the truck. Pyro gave her a cheerful wave. He was flicking a lighter, guarding the flame with his other hand against the wind. “ ~~ **You and Scout made me a hundred dollars. I’ll buy you a milkshake sometime**~~ ”

She smiled back, half-heartedly, and sat down beside Heavy. She pulled an old, cracked and faded dossier from inside her sweater and held it mutely in her lap. As the truck grumbled to life again, she felt Heavy’s hand pat her shoulder as he pretended not to notice her crying.


	16. Metal Pins and Rods

"He will lose the leg. If he lives at all, it is because I am a genius.  He had cracked a rib and punctured a lung, but between my gun and a cobbled together dispenser, we have pulled him through that. The leg though,  _nein_. He will certainly lose the leg.”

Pauling felt numb and dull and her hands had finally stopped trembling, but they started up again. She clenched them into fists. “It’ll kill him.”

"This leg will,  _ja_. Within the hour, if I do not amputate. Where is Pyro? O Negative, I can take a great deal  _out_ of Scout, but it begins to be a problem when he needs it put back in.”

"I mean if you do. He won’t… I don’t think he can come back from something like that. Please, can’t you try…I know you could save it, Doctor. I know you don’t need to do it for him, but you could. I know you could."

Medic almost looked apologetic. She knew better than to believe it, but it was at least courteous of him to pretend. “Yes, Fraulein. I could. In my fully equipped theatre, with nine hours to work, with enough blood to last the surgery, I could fill him with metal pins and rods and leave him with a mostly useless limb which would end his career and probably pain him the rest of his life. It would be a feat of technical mastery and in other circumstances I would be doing it as we speak. But no, Miss Pauling. He will lose the leg. For my convenience, if nothing else.” He nodded to Heavy, to Demo. He briefly put a hand on Miss Pauling’s shoulder. He turned and went back to work.

Oh god.

They had gotten to Big Rock. She had bullied them into going to MannWorks. They were still being pursued by a ragtag collection of robots and Scout was still half-dead, but she needed to get to the factory. She had huddled in the back of the truck between Heavy and Pyro and she was just so worried and tired and heartsick, and she hated her job, hated what she needed to do.

And now they were at the factory, and she’d hidden the stupid not-a-teleporter, tucked it away with her damn dossier. The mercs had gleefully cleared out the robots that had followed them. They had gone two weeks without fighting anything, and whatever reason the robots had for swarming down on them in Coal Town had not been well thought out. So, gleeful, cathartic carnage. Soldier and Pyro were still roaming around outside, securing the perimeter, collecting robot heads. Sniper was on the roof, keeping watch, Spy had vanished, true to form. Medic and Engie had claimed the kitchen off the break room, they had vanished inside with Scout more than two hours ago, and the Doctor had only emerged now, to pass on an update.

It hadn’t been good news.

Well, she was just crying now. Tired, frustrated, frightened, grieving something she had never actually had, but was still somehow on the brink of losing. And she never cried, especially not in front of people, especially not in front of the mercs. She knew they all loved and respected her and that was a big part of the reason that she buried all the bodies they left behind. Cheerfully and without flinching. What in the world would they think of her now?

Thankfully, Heavy and Demo had been left to look after Miss Pauling. She had been sitting numbly in a chair in the break room for two hours, and now she had slumped forward with her face in her hands, brokenly sobbing. And Demo handled explosives for a living. His colleagues may not have the nerves or the delicacy to handle trinitrotoluene or C4, or tearful, tired Paulings. But Tavish Finnegan DeGroot was a gentleman of unbelievable delicacy with taut, finely tuned nerves of steel. Despite all appearances. He put a hand on her hair, kindly.

“Oh, now, bonny brave lass. Naught more you can do here, wee dear girl. Aye, you come along, we’ll find ye a place tae be warm and safe and quiet.”

Heavy was equally a gentleman, if rather less delicate. He gathered Miss Pauling into a hug. “Matroyshka, this thing has happened. It is a war, this is what happens. This thing is not your fault.”

Pauling, of course, knew backwards and forwards the reasons why it  _was_ her fault, because against all rationality they kept running through her head. She could have rattled them all off without stopping for breath, but between shuddering sobs, all she could say was, “But it’s Scout.” A fierce, fresh swell of emotion, up from her stomach. “It’s  _always_ been Scout. And he drives everyone crazy, he drives  _me_ crazy, he is loud and annoying and he shows off and he never shuts up, but then he’s sweet and he’s funny and he  _loved_ me and I  _tried_ not to, but I wanted him the way he  _was_ , and now he’ll be different. It’s because of  _me_ , and I can’t bear it.”

Demo continued patting her hair. “Dunnae worry your heart so, Scout’s tough as nails. He’ll pull though, lass, let them work and let him be. Ye’ll get your time time to fuss and tend him, don’t fret about that. He dunnae take much lookin’ after, he’s always been about seventy-percent limbs. Mostly ye just keep him from gettin’ ‘em caught in doors. Be about twenty-five percent easier now.”

Miss Pauling had always had a dark streak in her. She couldn’t help it, it was the way she was. And she hadn’t  _meant_ to laugh, didn’t want to, it wasn’t funny. But a hysterical giggle hiccuped its way out of her, and she buried her face in Heavy’s chest and wailed.

For the second time in as many days, one of the mercs scooped her up off her feet and brought her somewhere where she could be safe, and warm, and quiet.


	17. It Was Friday

The safest, warmest, quietest place in the factory was not actually in the factory at all, and was the place where Sniper had set up camp. He had moved from the roof to the top floor of one of the outbuildings. So that was where they had put Miss Pauling. She had curled up on a cot underneath Heavy’s jacket, cried for a while, and then slept.

The smell of brewing coffee woke her. It was pitch dark. She was still tired, but felt better, if disoriented. She sat up, shrugging her way out of the monstrosity of fur and leather that Heavy wore when it got cold. It wasn’t really cold enough out to merit it, yet, but Miss Pauling thought it probably reminded him of home.

“Morning, Miss Pauling. Got coffee on, be another few minutes.”

It wasn’t actually quite pitch dark. There was moonlight, starlight through the window. Sniper was leaning against the frame, silhouetted. Miss Pauling stayed sitting on the bed, letting herself catch back up with everything that had happened. “What time is it?”

One of her favourite things about Sniper was that he always knew what time it was. They were kindred spirits when it came to timepieces. He had a patient, meticulous way of doing things, and as he crossed the room to turn on the light and pour the coffee, he pulled out his own pocket watch. Australium plated, neatly engraved. Miss Pauling, when she wasn’t in the midst of a robot war and a teleporter hadn’t thrown her watch out of sync with reality, tried to keep time as accurately as she could. She wound her watch like it was her religion. She wore it with the face on the inside of her wrist, and it had gone out of true. It was squarish, more masculine than something she would have picked for herself, but it had been a gift, and she was very fond of it.

“Coming up on two minutes after twelve.” Sniper had flipped open the face of his pocket watch and, and Miss Pauling hastily spun the fiddly little golden dial. “And…mark.”

“Thank you,” she said, sincerely, pressing the button back down. Then she steeled herself. “Is…they were still…is Scout…?”

“Last I heard, they think he’ll be up by morning.”

Her heart leapt. “Up?”

Sniper turned and grimaced. “Sorry. Figure of speech. Awake. Near dawn, Engie says. That was a few hours ago, though.”

It was Friday.

“I need to go.”

“You gonna be okay in the dark? Mind yourself on the stairs.”

Miss Pauling nodded, looked around the room. “Thanks…for. Um. Well, I’m glad I wasn’t alone when I woke up.”

Sniper tipped his hat, smiled. “One professional to another, glad to have you back on the team, Miss Pauling.”

She smiled, beamed, in fact. On the team.  _Back_ on the team. “I missed you all.”

“Mostly Scout, from what I hear.”

“You all gossip like a bunch of old women.”

“Blame Spy.”

“Oh, I do.”

She took the stairs more quickly than she should have, regardless of the warning.

Miss Pauling wasn’t completely certain where she was going. Back to the breakroom, that was all she could think to do. She had forgotten Heavy’s jacket, it was colder than she thought. She was still wearing her ridiculous overalls, the ancient grey sweater. The wind cut right through it. She bowed her head and hurried.

“Halt! Who goes there?”

The swinging beam of a flashlight from the door to the factory proper nearly blinded her. She threw her arm up over her eyes, wincing. “It’s me, Soldier. Can I come in?”

The shotgun that had been pointed at her was lowered. Lights flicked on above the entrance of the building, someone had gotten the generator running. “Hullo, Miss Pauling. It’s a nice night out. Feeling better, Miss Pauling?”

She smiled again, nodded. Didn’t lie. “Yeah. I am, actually. Who got the lights up? I thought something shorted out most of the power systems when all the robots showed up.”

“Pyro got into the boiler room. I don’t think we’re going be able to get him back out.”

“Oh.”

Soldier tossed her a quick salute and held the door open for her. “Scout’ll be okay, Miss Pauling. Some of the best fighting men I knew had  _half_  as many limbs as he does.”

It could be hard to tell when Soldier was referring to people who actually existed. “I’m sure that’s true.” That was generally the best thing to say.

“Good night, Miss Pauling.”

“Safe watch, Soldier.”

Inside, the factory floor. Miss Pauling had always loved the MannWorks Quicklime Factory. She stopped by at least once a week, twice if it was a particularly busy week. It was the sort of place she hadn’t ever known existed growing up. Fascinating, raw, industrial. Engie loved it too, and they had once spent half a day playing hooky and touring the place. She smiled to herself. There was a secret she was looking forward to telling him, but it wasn’t yet time.

It was Engie she found in the break room. He had taken his hat off, propped his feet up on the table, dozing, but he woke up when she closed the door behind her. “H’lo, Miss Pauling.”

“Hi.”

Dell looked over his shoulder, towards the kitchen door. “Still in the kitchen. Heavy pulled a cot in there for the poor kid, he’s well and properly out of it. Woke up a couple of times when we were getting him settled. Not for long, doesn’t know where he is. Don’t think he knows what happened. Left leg’s gone, below the knee. Had the doc leave as much as he could, but it was a real damn bad break. I ain't rightly sure Medic coulda saved it, even if he'd had a proper operating room. it's the sort of thing he ought've respawned through, though we ain't in a position where any of us'll get that chance. Soberin' thought."

Miss Pauling couldn't tell if this was meant to be comforting. "What happens next?" 

Dell shrugged. "Gonna see if I can work out some kinda implant, graft a socket into the bone or some such. Ain't my problem til the Doc gets done fixin' him up. I drew up a couple plans. I’ll see what I can scrounge up, make him a pair of crutches in the meanwhile. Givin’ me a hell of a lot to think about.” He fixed Miss Pauling with a serious stare. “But there’s problems we had to deal with before this one, Miss Pauling. What the hell is going on with the teleporters, first n’ foremost. That is keeping me  _up_ nights, Miss Pauling. What the hell these damned robotic jackasses‘re after. I’m not the only one startin’ to suspect these things’re connected.”

Well, it was about time _someone_ started looking for answers. Miss Pauling knew she wasn’t going to be able to give him what he wanted. She could get him started, but there were too many questions she still had herself. “I’ll tell you everything I know in the morning.”

Engie was another person who always knew the time. He held up his hand and indicated the digital watch on his wrist. “Seems to me it’s the AM right now.”

The not-a-teleporter was on the table. The dossier, too. Miss Pauling knew the mercs, and she knew they wouldn’t have opened it. She trusted each and every one of them with her life, and they all knew it would be her job and more if any intelligence was compromised on her watch. She sighed. “Okay. But you know why I’m here, and you know it’s not to try and explain all this to you. I swear I know less than you think I do. I can start you on the right track, but this is big. Bigger than anything I’ve been handed before. And I’m the one who’s going to have to solve it, and I’m going to make those plans in the morning. The real morning, when the sun is up and everybody’s ready to talk to me. I’m going to need all of you.”

She picked up the dossier, opened it up. Leafing through, her fingers teased out one of the pages. There were ten in total. She skimmed the one she held, a little sadly. It was covered in tiny, detailed type, divided and subdivided, littered with cross references to the other pages in the file. A picture, stapled to the corner. She hadn’t noticed those, the first time she had opened the file. Miss Pauling held the page up, displayed it to Engi. “The Scout. This is a plan. That’s what this is, this folder. It’s a bunch of emergency back-up plans. Lists of resources. They’re all knit together, complicated. Contingencies six ways from Sunday. Tells me what to do. If I have three mercs, if I have five. If I have Demo and Soldier, or if I have Spy and Scout and Heavy. I can use you all the best ways possible, we can work something out. I’m lucky I have you all. I need you. And I mean  _all_ of you.”

“You ain’t tryin’ to tell me the old woman planned for a robot apocalypse.”

Miss Pauling flared slightly. “The  _Administrator_ ,” she corrected, sternly, eyes flashing behind her glasses. “She planned for a lot of things. More than you know. I never knew she’d planned for  _this_.”

Engie got up, rubbed the back of his neck. “Sorry. I didn’t mean no disrespect by it, I’m just tired. She’s a hell of a lady, she’s always surprised me. I oughta know better by now. And the teleporter?”

Miss Pauling shook her head. She carefully reinserted Scout’s page back into the dossier, withdrew The Engineer’s. The one with the impenetrable diagram, calculations scribbled all over it, double sided. “It’s not a teleporter. This’ll get you started. I won’t be able to tell you too much more than what this does, except what we’re going to do about it. But later. Not til morning.”

He took the paper from her hand. He had already pushed his goggles up, his eyes widening. “Holy hell.”

“Well, I’m glad it means  _something_  to someone, at least. It’s all greek to me.”

“Some of it actually  _is_  greek. Theta an’ pi, delta an’ whatnot.” Engie tore his gaze from the paper. “If you’re sayin’ this plan is gonna need all of us, Miss Pauling…Scout’s gonna pull through this, an’ between what me an’ the doc can do for him, he’s gonna heal quicker’n he would otherwise…but…ain’t gonna be easy. Still gonna take time. Weeks, longer maybe. Gonna cut the heart right outta him for a while.”

“I don’t know what the plan is yet. But I could do it with three of you or five of you or all of you.” She took off her glasses, rubbed her eyes. As much as she had looked forward to Friday, a part of her was dreading what came next. “I need Scout.  _I_ do, just me. He looked for me. I know you all probably thought I could take care of myself, and I  _could_ , and I didn’t want to be found. Or…I mean, I didn’t  _know_  I wanted to be found. But in a little part of me that I’ve never told anyone about, I wanted  _him_ to find me, and he did.”

Engie came nearer, put a hand on her shoulder. “It ain’t your fault, darlin’.”

“I  _know_  that.” Miss Pauling shrugged his hand off, angrily.  She hadn’t meant to get angry, and it went out of her as quickly as it had flared up. She sighed. “I know that. I do. It was a stupid, dumb accident. Not anybody’s fault. But he’ll be different now. And I loved him the way he was, and we should’ve both stopped being stupid about it a lot sooner than we did. Mostly me. We should’ve gone out, gone to see a movie, gone for dinner, gone dancing. Just gone  _somewhere_. I don’t even know how to dance.” She fixed Engie with a serious, flat stare. “But we didn’t. And I don’t know if we’ll get to. So I want one night. One night, while he’s still the same. Before it all comes crashing down on top of him, I get to be selfish, and pretend things are still okay.”

There wasn’t anything Dell could say to that.  So, wordlessly, he crossed the room and opened the door to the kitchen for her. She nodded, and stepped inside.


	18. Small and Subtle, Shy Things

He’d forgotten her name. A pair of big, lovely green eyes staring at him in the dark, smiling, a tress of dark hair fallen in front of her glasses. Miss Pauling, obviously. He knew that, Miss Pauling, everyone knew that. But he’d known something more, or he was pretty sure he had. He wasn’t sure of much at the moment.

“Hey.”

He had  _said it_ , he remembered saying it, but forgot what it was. He had said it to Engie and then he’d nearly choked on what had felt like a lungful of blood. Bad, something bad. Worse than he’d had in a long time. It crossed his mind that he hadn’t wanted anyone else to know. About her name. It’d been  _pretty_ , too, exactly perfect for her. God.

She had moved when he opened his eyes again, sat on the floor, her head nestled next to his elbow. Left elbow, busted. Ow, he remembered that. It was really dark. Cold. She had been cold, and it’d been dark. A long time ago, he’d held her, just a little while, because she’d been shaking. Well, one good arm, still. Hurt to lift it, reach across his chest, something had been done to his ribs, too. He remembered the crack of a ribcage, hadn’t thought it had been his. He remembered hitting Spy in the face. Ha. It wasn’t what he  _wanted_ to remember, he wanted to remember the name of the girl he’d been in love with for six years. He touched her hair, instead.

She lifted her head, and again with those eyes. “Hi,” softly, kindly. She lifted her chin so his fingers brushed her cheek, then lifted her hand to cradle his, her palm warm against his knuckles. Someone had unwrapped them. He hoped he didn’t need to punch Spy again. Barehanded, there was just not as much oomph to a good solid hit to the mouth, and he hated the way teeth bit into the thin layer of skin on the backs of his hands. Like they were going to bite right down to the bone.

Sitting next to him, this time. Now. What was the time? She always knew the time. That was her job. She had a watch, a gold, squarish face, gleaming on the inside of her wrist. He tried to read the time, too dark, tiny, delicate hands. Pretty hands, wow, such pretty hands. He knew she wore a watch, he’d never seen it up close. Hadn’t ever seen her hands this well, either, there was a freckle just above the pale ivory of the watchface, right where her wrist bent. He could only see these things because her fingertips were teasing lightly through his hair, brushing across his temple, circling beneath his eye, across his lips. Not a word this time, just a smile. Her _name_. If he could say anything, he hoped it would be that.

It was brighter now. Morning? Morning. Still dim, early. Morning. He couldn’t see her, even with the grey light seeping in from somewhere, he didn’t know. Warmer, now. Because she’d lain her body down, next to his, her head on his shoulder, an arm across his hips, well below his slowly aching ribs. He was starting to feel it now, again. He remembered feeling it before, remembered looking up at her and being glad that she was there. Broken arm, broken ribs, broken leg. Head ringing, sound rising and falling around him. Not anymore. Just semi-dark, the warmth of her. Couldn’t tell which one of them was breathing.   

She moved, her hand on his stomach now. It was brightening, still. Shadows, shapes. When he turned his head to try and see more, her hair rubbed against his chin, caught ever so slightly. He needed a shave, hadn’t had one in days. Usually kept on top of it. Face would itch. He felt an involuntary twitch of her fingers, shuddered helplessly. She stirred.

“Oh, shh. Shh, I’m sorry. You’re okay. Did that hurt?”

Yes. “Nn.”

“Try and lie still. Shh.”

Pain was starting to spark up from his ankle, his toes tingled. Left leg, well, they’d be symmetrical now, anyway, he’d broken the right one when he was twelve, it had healed just a little funny, just enough to be a wee bit longer than the other. Long enough ago he didn’t remember needing to learn to compensate for it. There was a lot he couldn’t remember right now. He remembered that he’d hobbled around on crutches for six weeks, and then he’d just learned to cope. Crutches again. Well, they could be fun. Wheelchair, maybe, if he was sore and lazy. Definitely sore. Currently lazy. Actually, wheels would be quite a lot more fun.

Her hand again, up, cupped against the side of his neck, thumb running along his jawline.  _Itchy_ , god. Miss Pauling, knock it off. Not Miss Pauling. God damn it all. Now her fingers, toying gently with the chain his mom had given him. Dog tags, everyone thought, but hiding a tiny silver  medallion of St. Christopher between them. His ma sure was big on saints.

Oh, fuck it. Her name was gone forever. He’d lost it, it wasn’t coming back. She was there, though. Safe and warm and she didn’t  _belong_  where she was, but he didn’t want her ever to leave.

“Mm…”

She pushed herself up now and he could see her face and he smiled. And she grinned, the way she didn’t do for just anybody, her smiles were usually small and subtle, shy things, like birds. But this was a big damn smile, happy, tears in her eyes. “Hello, Scout.”

“Mm. Miss Pauling.”

Her smile wavered, just for a moment. One of the tears slipped loose. “Oh, Edie. Please, Edie.” She leaned in, kissed him. Like he’d never known another girl to do before, with that little tease of her teeth, tugging his bottom lip. Just her, once before, like he’d never forget.

Oh, right.

His Edie.


	19. Anguished, Unbearable

Someone had pelted her in the cheek with bread. Miss Pauling was curled up on a too narrow cot, awkwardly, fitting into the space next to Scout. It was in defiance of all reason that she’d managed to make herself comfortable, all while being careful not to touch his ribs or his arm or, god forbid, the place where his left leg had been. But she had, and she was sleeping and he was sleeping, and whoever had just lobbed a stale kaiser roll onto her face was going to be murdered.

When she managed to slowly, carefully extricate herself and turn to face the doorway with blazing, mortally dangerous green eyes, the other eight mercs realized they were in trouble.

“Wake him, and  _die_ ,” she threatened, once. Sufficiently.

“Tavish threw it,” Spy tattled, immediately.

“You bloody damn coward of a cheese eatin’, wine swillin’ frog of a Frenchman, can you an’ your whole bloody country nae go five minutes without lyin’ down and surrenderin’?”

Soldier added helpfully, attempting to keep the peace, for once in his life, “You did throw it, though.” He was not very good at it.

Dell cleared his throat, quietly. “He’s probably gotta couple more hours worth of morphine in him, Miss Pauling. And, uh. Well, it’s comin’ up on ten in the mornin’ an’ with respect…” He was still carrying the page from the dossier that she’d handed him last night. “We really gotta talk about this.”

She glanced at her watch, sighed. Ridiculous mercenaries. Ridiculous morning, ridiculous situation. Her ridiculous job. This stupid ridiculous sweater, ridiculous overalls. Fine. Just damn fine. She’d only wanted one night. Only  _needed_  one night, that was, she wanted many, many more. “Five more minutes. I’ll be out. But give me five more minutes.” Things were about to get much, much more ridiculous[.](http://i%20warned%20you/)

“Yes’m.”

What was five minutes? She just sat quietly for four of them, watching Scout, trying to wish herself miles away from the problems that waited outside. Trying to wish them both back to a time before any of this had happened. Back to the beginning. She’d thought he was cute, six years ago, back when they’d both been young enough not to have any idea what you were supposed to do with a ridiculously attractive co-worker who was probably off-limits. She’d been shy and nervous and bubbling over with a need to be good at her job, he’d been skinny and awkward and full of bravado, desperate to measure up to his colleagues. God, he was handsome. Somewhere along the line he had grown into his face, and somehow she’d failed to notice. She hated to notice it now, with bruises blending into the dark circles beneath his eyes. Still, though, handsome. Even sleeping. Maybe especially sleeping.

There was a melancholy weight sitting in the middle of her stomach as she stood up, nearly holding her down. It sat on top of a growling hunger, it had been entirely too long since she’d eaten anything. The rock hard kaiser roll that Demo had bounced off her face sat on the floor by her foot, and she nudged it. Not  _that_ hungry. She wasn’t wearing shoes. She hadn’t been wearing shoes for hours, her feet were bruised from walking across the Badlands. She hadn’t even thought of it.

Well, and beyond that, her hair was an untidy, flyaway tangle. Her sweater was three sizes too big, her overalls had been cuffed nearly up to her knees. Her skirt lay on the floor of an abandoned warehouse, covered in a dried crust of tomato soup. She needed to wind her watch. She wasn’t a professional at the moment, she was a  _mess_. She sighed, gathered her hair up. Set her jaw.

There was a soft knock on the door, and she double-checked her watch, out of habit. The windows in the kitchen ran around the top of the room, above the cabinets. A narrow band of sunlight was tracking down the wall, marking the passage of the day. And there wasn’t time. There just wasn’t time, it kept melting out of her hands. Mistake after mistake.

Regretfully, she crossed the room. Couldn’t bring herself to look at Scout, couldn’t turn back, not even to touch his hand or his face or to kiss him again. Now the thing she dreaded most in the world was the moment when he would find out what had happened, and she didn’t want to run the risk of waking him and ruining his life. Someone was going to have to, eventually. Edie wasn’t sure she had the strength to be the person who did.

So she stepped back out into the kitchen. The mercs were waiting, patiently gathered around the table in the break room. The not-a-teleporter and dossier still sat on the table. Miss Pauling approached it, took charge of the room. “Okay. Guys. This is a mess. And you have been patient, and you’ve busted your asses, and you’ve done what you were told. And thank you. All of you, really, thank you. You didn’t need to stay, you’ve got no obligation to Mann Co in a situation like this. I don’t know what happened, I don’t really know why. I’ve been trapped here for over two weeks, the same as any of you, but I’ll tell you what I know.”

She was shorter than every single one of them, she weighed a third of what Heavy did. Several of them could have fathered her—she probably would have had a better childhood if one of them had. She’d spend a quarter of her life watching them kill and be killed, in the ridiculous game that they all played, for ridiculous, invisible stakes. She’d played her own part in keeping up the illusion, maintaining the status quo in the tiny little world that was the Badlands. But when she ran a room, regardless of what they knew about her, believed about her, they always listened.

Miss Pauling took a deep breath. “Okay. There are two important things. I’m sorry I wasn’t able to tell you about them sooner. Don’t mob me with questions as soon as I tell you, when I’m done, you’ll know just as much as I do. Okay? So. First of all, the Administrator is dead. No, I haven’t seen a body, no I don’t know who killed her or how. That is what started this. I have instructions for this scenario, but that brings us to item two.”

She paused. Now she was standing at the edge of the deep end.  She steeled herself. This was something she had never known, was never supposed  to have  _needed_ to know. This was the last ditch effort, the final gambit, in the event that anything ever happened to the Administrator. She had known there was a plan. She hadn’t know it was this. “That teleporter? On the table? Is not a teleporter. It is a time machine.”

Dead air. Dead silence. Eight incredulous stares, a total of thirteen eyes staring wide at her, plus Pyro, Dell having pushed his goggles up onto his forehead, and Demo only having one eye with which to goggle at her.

It was still sinking in. Pauling  had to tell them that that was all she knew. That there would be a plan, but for now, this was as far as the plan had taken her. She needed time. Presumably this was how she was going to get it, but she had no idea how the damn thing worked, that was Engie’s job. She needed resources. Well, these we were the men who would help her get her hands on whatever the situation demanded. She needed to stop, she needed to sit, she needed to think and discuss and scheme and brainstorm and  _plan_. She needed all of them. She needed help.

If she had told them a little sooner, maybe they would have adjusted by now. Maybe there would’ve been a babble of questions, maybe she wouldn’t have heard them, maybe she would’ve had to raise her voice, tell them that they could take the time they needed, that they would reconvene once everyone had had some time to process. There wouldn’t have been heartbeat after heartbeat of silence, so that she could hear a faint shifting, a faint moan from the cracked open door of the kitchen behind her.

A shuffle, a thud, and then the most anguished, unbearable sound she’d ever heard in her life, and she killed men for a living. She had spilled the lives out of people who probably didn’t deserve it, in the grand scheme of things, not really. And this was what made her different from the mercs. Made her colder, made her harder, just a little bit more dangerous. Made her sad and lonely childhood into the thing that gave her an edge. The people they killed didn’t stay killed. When Edith Amelia Pauling killed a man, it was permanent. And then she she burned or dissolved him to ashes and dust.

She knew what it sounded like, when you killed someone. She heard it at least once a week. But what she heard behind her stabbed through her heart like a knife, and she realized as she turned on her heel that she would be hearing it the rest of her life.

She needed to go.


	20. Interlude - Dust Went Everywhere

Miss Pauling seemed to be the only person in the room who had not been expecting this, waiting for it. Heavy had already been standing by the door, he pulled it closed as she turned. Everyone else had seen her face crumple, sudden empathy tearing through her, never mind that she had moments ago attempted to tell them she had a time machine. There were tears in her eyes now, and she stopped short, staring up at him, heartbroken and bewildered.

“Heavy,” she sounded startled, a little betrayed. There was a torn, broken sob, barely audible through the door and she seemed to shrink a little from it. “What…”

He shook his head. “Not you, Miss Pauling.”

“I—”

“Love him? This is not useful. Soldier, Medic. They are useful. They will go.”

They were already ready, standing behind her, they’d been waiting. Soldier clapped a hand on her shoulder. “In good hands, Miss Pauling.”

Medic had nothing to say, merely nodded as he passed her. He did call over his shoulder, “Pyro, I may need more blood.”

 ~~“~~ ~~ **This is not what I had anticipated when Scout said we were blood buddies. I don’t want to be a blood buddy.”**~~  There was a sigh through the mask and Pyro undid a zipper in the sleeve of his jacket, opening a slot wide enough to stick a needle through. This seemed to be the only reason it existed. “ ~~ **We don’t even have any cookies and juice**~~ **.”**

* * *

 When Soldier offered to help people hold their guts in, people tended to think he meant it literally. This was more the kind of thing he actually meant.

He’d seen a lot of war movies, though. Probably all of them. It was hard to get people to watch them with him, generally he had the volume up too loud. He claimed it added to the realistic ambiance, but truthfully he was mostly deaf in one ear and all the way deaf in the other.

So he had speeches prepared. Endless speeches, there wasn’t a war movie he hadn’t seen, he knew exactly what the grizzled old sergeant was supposed to say, sitting in a foxhole holding the poor dumb private from Boston, with the cocky attitude and the mouth on him, with the seven other brothers gone off to war before him, with his ma back home, with a girl he was sweet on, with half of him gone. With his first real taste of war.

Jane Doe had seen so many war flicks, the things those brave men said all ran together. Scout couldn’t hear him anyway, not over the shaking and sobbing and the grief wrenching through him. The poor damn kid in the movies was always dying. Quietly. Soldier said the words anyway, all of them he could think of.

Mostly he was here to help hold Scout still, help keep him from hurting himself. Mostly it didn’t matter what he said, but he said it anyway.

“Done us all proud, son, real proud. Don’t you worry about your girl, private, we’ll make sure she’s looked after. Good boy. Atta boy.”

* * *

 Scout had taken his blood. Pyro liked his blood, he needed his blood, he did not want to be blood buddies. He liked Scout, though, he was glad Scout wasn’t dead. Everybody liked Scout, it was just hard sometimes. Scout could sometimes be a bully, sometimes he didn’t know when to stop.

So Pyro took Scout’s leg. Scout liked his leg, but he didn’t need it anymore. Or if he did, it would be inconvenient to try and carry a leg around with him anywhere. Why would he want to do that, that would be dumb. Still. It was good to have the option.

So Pyro took it. And he burned it. He had wanted to ask Miss Pauling for advice, but she seemed to need to be left alone. Pyro was good at leaving people alone.

He used one of the boilers. Several of them were out of operation, emptied of coal. But the inside was fireproof, and he could fill them with fire, and have nothing but ashes left. It was lean. Well, naturally. Fat would have helped it burn faster. It took a long time, but at the end, just ashes and bones.

The bones were a problem. They were big, but brittle. Pyro had to climb halfway into the mouth of the boiler to pull all the ashes out, he scraped them into a pile with his gloves. The bones were easiest to pick out. But they made him sad to look at, made the whole thing real. It was sad, he was sad. Scout would be sad. Bones would make him sadder. He chopped them up, into the littlest bits he could.

He had found a jar. It was a nice jar, heavy, thick glass. It seemed like a good choice. He sat at the edge of the boiler and filled it. Dust went everywhere. But he got as much of it as he could. He screwed the lid on.

He found paper and pen, wrote a note. “Leg. Sorry.”

That seemed like all he could do.


	21. Wasn't Flesh and Blood, But Metal and Leather

For someone who had made a career out of being stabbed and shot and blown up and killed at least a dozen times a day, Scout had never prepared himself for anything remotely like this.

When he’d been seventeen, his dog had died. Not his dog, technically. His mom’s dog, a scrappy, spry little terrier mongrel that had pre-dated her youngest son’s addition to the family. His name had been Chip and he had been probably the best dog in the world. Chip had just always been there. He had been  _ancient_ when he’d died, for a dog. But it hadn’t been quietly from old age, slowly declining. Scout had never been able to decide if that would’ve been worse. Chip had picked up rabies from somewhere, and Scout’s mom had shot him.

It’d been years before he’d forgiven her. It had been a stupid accident, bad luck, and she’d only done what she’d had to. Something he wouldn’t have been able to do, not back then. And probably still not now. But there hadn’t been anyone else to blame, and he hadn’t been able to help it. He’d left home angry and grieving. It hadn’t been the only reason, but it had catalyzed something. With Chip gone and his mother to be furious with, it was like there was no reason to stay.

This had been a stupid accident. Bad luck. Random and unbelievable. But he ached for someone to blame.

And just ached. God, he hurt like he hadn’t…well. Ever. Never like this, never sustained, even against a wash of numbing painkillers, deep, brutal. Bruises, par for the course. Broken ribs he knew, broken bones. The vague, dizzy blur of a concussion, it was practically his second state of mind. He’d had limbs blown off. Violent, sudden. Over in less than a moment. Respawn. It never let you waste a moment bleeding out if things were hopeless.

His leg hadn’t been lost, this time, but taken. In a way that he wouldn’t get it back, not for any bargain or ransom.

Whatever Medic had given him didn’t help. Not really. It didn’t take the pain far enough away from him, just sort of shifted it to the side. To the left side of him, mirrored. Like when he looked down, he was looking at what was left of someone else. It still hurt like the devil.

It hurt like there wasn’t enough of him to hurt with, because of course there wasn’t. Right below his knee was just clear, sharp pain. Like the tone of a bell, pure, holding at the height of its loudest volume. Pain like a middle C. Muffled, swathed about with bandages, itchy and hot. Already seeping a bloodied, sickly yellow where the freshly made wound had been closed and painted with iodine. The bandages were tight, holding the pain in, bound, like an alive thing.  Reverberating like a hand holding that same bell.

Not ending there. The worst of it ghosted downward, shocks of agony, looking for a place to justify their existence. Trying to resolve themselves into the right kind of pain, itching then freezing, burning, numb with pins and needles, and the slow seeping sensation of blood draining.

But mirrored. To the left of him. Separate, happening to someone else. Shifted over by by morphine or codeine or whatever Medic had available to give him. He dreaded what it would feel like when it came back to center. When it started really happening to him.

Scout hadn’t believed it. He had woken up in a dim room, hazy and confused, because it seemed to be a kitchen. Remembering Miss Pauling but afraid he had dreamt her, because it was the kind of thing he had been dreaming for years. He remembered seeing her leave him, but before, vanishing through a teleporter. So he had summoned up the effort, sat up, tried to go find someone who knew where she was.

After that, just a blur of horror and pain and panic. Medic had shown up, Soldier. Scout had been bleeding, stitches torn, popped open when the stump of his left leg had hit the ground. The doctor had grumbled and muttered to himself in German, Soldier had dropped down to the floor like he did this every day, held him still. Eventually the fight had drained out of him, and he had wept like he hadn’t since his dog had died. Soldier had stayed. Medic had worked. Scout eventually cried himself out, sank into the sensation of slowly falling, when Medic gave him another shot.

Engie had been there when he woke up again, quietly building a Dispenser beside the bed. It seemed to take a long time to build quietly. He was somewhere different now, an office of some kind, lying on his right side, on a cot tucked against the wall. He remembered bits and fragments, but like it had all still happened to someone else. Even when he looked down at the abbreviated part of him and couldn’t stifle a shocked, hiss of breath through his teeth, it was like it belonged to a stranger.

Engie had looked up, then abandoned what he was working on. Sat down on the edge of the bed, taken his goggles off. Turned them over idly in his hands. He had just looked at Scout for a few moments, before sighing. “It is a goddamned, fucking awful, hell of a thing that’s gone an’ happened to you, Scout. Ain’t a thing I can say by way of sympathy won’t sound trite, ‘cept maybe that I at least got an idea what this feels like. Ain’t anything anyone can say is gonna help you right now.”

"Wh-what…I. I mean, I need…how’m I… Oh,  _god_.”

He’d curled up, then, shaking. His left arm was splinted, awkward and painful. But he pulled it close anyway, against his aching chest. Tucked his left leg up, though it felt wrong and bad, tried to hold himself together. Failed.

Dell just put a hand on his shoulder and sat for a while, quiet, til the worst of it had passed. “I can’t help you much now, son, wish t’ god that I could. I can tell you, between me and the Doc, we’ll getcha patched up quick as we can. Do in days what oughta take weeks, an’ you’re gonna hurt less, for what it’s worth, which I know can’t seem like much. Truthfully, I know it ain’t.”

"Dell, I dunno what I’m gonna  _do_.”

"Lotta things. Rest. Sleep. Heal. Hurt. Mourn. Rage. Talk, when you can, if you want. I’ll be here, whatever you wanna say. Ain’t none of it gonna be wrong. Gonna get better. I can’t tell you how, I don’t rightly know what it’s gonna be for you. Hell, I can’t even fairly promise that it will, not if I’m honest. I ain’t a bettin’ man, though, and I’d put money on you beatin’ this thing, Scout. It  _is_  a hell of a thing. But you’re a scrappy son of a bitch, and I’ll do what I can to help.”

Almost none of it really helped, the only part of it that did was knowing that it wasn’t supposed to. Not a word he’d said would’ve mattered, except the hand still on Scout’s shoulder wasn’t warm, wasn’t flesh and blood, but metal and leather. And the Engineer was one of the best, smartest, toughest men Scout knew. So maybe that was still something. “…okay.”

“I’ll get this thing up and runnin’, start to take some of the edge off. Medic’s tinkerin’ around with that gun of his, tryin’ to get it back up past half-capacity. Damnedest thing, needs to be torn down and reworked completely, but ain’t a one of us wants to risk bein’ without it for as long as it’d take. He’ll do some more for ya once he’s free, though.” Engie paused, put his goggles back on. “And, uh. Miss Pauling wanted to see you.”

“Edie,” Scout echoed, automatically, afraid he’d lose it again. Except now it felt different to say it out loud.

“You don’t have to see her, if you don’t want. We’ll all leave you alone, her included, if that’s what you need. Don’t you worry if it ain’t somethin’ you can handle right now. That’s fine. She’ll understand.”

When in his life had he ever not wanted to see her? That couldn’t be true. “No…I mean, yeah, it’s okay. She can…if she wants, I mean. M’tired, I dunno…” Just talking was exhausting, he still felt beside himself, fuzzy and numb. “S’fine.”

Engie peered at him, inscrutable behind his goggles. “Only if you’re sure.”

He wasn’t. But, “Yeah.”


	22. Metaphysical Implications

“We are meant to alter _time_ for this woman. Why?”

Spy wouldn’t let it go. MannWorks had a board room. It was dark and cold, the sun was setting, cool red light shining through the windows. Miss Pauling had poor circulation in her hands. Her fingers had been cold for two weeks now, but trying to conduct this discussion with her hands jammed in her armpits would lack the necessary gravitas. They were losing their light, Pyro had wandered off somewhere, and Demo had gone to find him, to get him back down to the boiler room. The backup generators in the factory were steampowered, and if you had someone who was happy to shovel coal into a roaring inferno for hours on end, they would run for as long as the coal held out. If this person was also occasionally distracted by a compulsion to search for butterflies, that was a bug and not a feature.

“Because it’s in your contracts. Because I’m asking you to. Because we’re talking about an army of robots who are searching for a time machine-- _this time machine_ \--to give it to a madman. The guy who’s penned _us_ in with his army of five thousand robots. Because somehow he knows that _we have a time machine_.”

“ _Why do we have a time machine_?” Spy demanded. He had been smoking furiously and was running out of cigarettes. The room was dense with fragrant, heavy cigarette smoke, but it was too cold to open the windows. “We are the last people in the world who should have a time machine. It should be destroyed.”

“S’too late for that,” Engie answered, on Miss Pauling’s behalf. “It’s...look. You ain’t got enough degrees in the hard sciences for me to explain what exactly the problem is. The teleporters ain’t...augh. They ain’t one thing. They ain’t a collection of single things, either, they’re a matrix. Every one of ‘em relates to every other one, they gotta be calibrated, aimed at each other. Soon as this one got introduced, when I brought it online, it changed a paradigm. I’m not sure how. We destroy this one, might be every other one just stays busted. We gotta careful, or it’ll be like tryin’ to fix a watch with a sledgehammer. I got the beginnings of the shape of an idea, but I’m lookin’ at map of a coastline. I gotta get a hell of a lot closer to know where the rocks are.”

Spy scowled. “I do not condone this. _Merde_. Two weeks! Two weeks of my existence, erased! Hours, days. What is happening to this loose time?”

Heavy had not contributed significantly to the discussion. As far as it could be considered to have sides, he had remained mostly impartial. “The time is not being lost. The time is simply not happening. You did not lose two weeks. Two weeks lost you.”

“ _Where_?”

Miss Pauling was nursing a tension headache and had leaned forward with her elbows on the table, massaging the back of her neck with her fingertips. “Guys. Can we agree that the metaphysical implications of the fact that we have a time machine is less important than the _practical_ implication?”

The practical implication had made itself apparent earlier that afternoon.

Sniper had reported movement from the perimeter. Robots had descended Coal Town. One in about every fifty had broken from the ring that encircled them, and marched towards the place they had just fled. Now nearly a hundred of them swarmed and coalesced around the abandoned mining town, and it became obvious that there had been a very narrow miss. There was substantial tension around the notion that maybe they would be followed on to the factory. It hadn’t happened yet.

Engie carried a robot head around. Not everywhere, but he’d picked one up at some point, and had worked out how to wire it to a power source. Not constantly, but he hooked it up and checked on it, now and again. Usually after anything had happened with the teleporters. He hadn’t completely made the connection, but he had started pulling a few threads together. It had been his theory that the larger discrepancies with the teleporters were being detected by the robots that surrounded them. That the roamers that combed their little circle of the Badlands were trying to hone in on Miss Pauling’s time-machine.

“The practical fact is that we don’t know what good the damned contraption does us. If we use it, we will be mobbed, overrun, and murdered. In my opinion, it’s done enough damage already.”

Miss Pauling exhaled slowly. This hadn’t been how she’d wanted to spend her day. “Spy. You’re fine. It’s fine. I respect your right to have a complex existential crisis about this, but have it on your own time. I’m not asking you to go through the teleporter again. I’m not asking _any_ of you to. That’s going to be my problem.”

“I do not care who does it. I refuse to concede that it is being done for the sake of an old woman none of us have ever met. A disembodied voice on a loudspeaker. This is what you ask us to risk a crime against the nature of _reality_ for.”

“You’re all still contracted until the end of the year. You’ll risk what I _tell_ you to risk.” Miss Pauling stood up, put her hands flat on the surface of the table. The nine pages were arrayed neatly in a three by three square. “I’ve shown you all my cards. Everything that was given to me? It’s more than just how I can _use_ you to do what I need--it’s how I can _make_ you do what I need. It’s the threats I could make, the things I could do if you wouldn’t do what you were told. You _all_ have things that can be held against you, and _I refuse to do that_. I’m not going to say _Nuremberg_ to Medic, I’m not going to say _Dzhugdzhur_ to Heavy. It’s all there, black and white, and I’m telling you I won’t use it against you.”

“You’re asking us to do this thing for the woman who _would_.”

“ _No_. I’m asking you to help me stop the man who _killed_ her.” She shook her head. “Look. I can’t explain what the Administrator has done. I don’t understand half her reasons myself. But she’s _my boss_. She’s the only boss I’ve ever had, and she gave me a job. And I’m going to do it, until I can’t do it anymore. I’ve failed at plenty of things in my life, I’m not about to fail at this.  I can’t defend her, except to say that whatever she’s done, she’s kept it confined to the nine of you and the Badlands. We’re talking about a man who’s built an army of killer robots, and we don’t know what he’s planning to use them for. You can’t tell me there’s no moral high ground in trying to stop him.”

Miss Pauling hadn’t expected opposition from Spy. Spy could usually be counted on not to bat an eye at even the most objectionable notions, if the price was right. Maybe it hadn’t been clear what price was being paid. She tapped a finger on the table, the nine pages again. “That’s all of it. That’s what we had to blackmail you with. I’m giving it up, because I _know_ I’m asking a lot. Take whatever steps you need to, when we get out of this. But for now, you work for me.”

Heavy spoke up before anyone else could, another contribution to the discussion, "We will agree that we work for Miss Pauling.” It sounded like more of a threat than a suggestion. “We fight a worthless war for tiny rocks, on behalf of idiots. We defy death, we are bad men who have done terrible things. Miss Pauling says the man who wants her machine is worse? We will do what she asks.”

“I can’t be the only one who thinks that should depend on what she’s _asking_.”

Dell interceded. “No. But until we know what that is, only decent thing to do is to hear the lady out. Fellas, it’s dark. It’s cold. Tavish oughta’ve been back from helpin’ Pyro with the boiler by now, meanin' something got fouled up, so I’m gonna go sort that out.  We been at this like dogs with a bone for hours, beggin’ your pardon Miss Pauling. We ain’t comin’ to any kinda sensible conclusion tonight, an’ we all got better places to be.” He looked significantly at Miss Pauling. “We’ll pick this up in the morning. I know I got scroungin’ around to do. Miss Pauling, you wanna come along with me, gotta few more things we should discuss.”

There was only a sliver of red-gold sun left above the horizon. There were maybe another six hours worth of Friday left. Miss Pauling stood, nodded wearily. “Guys, I’m sorry this is complicated. I wish it wasn’t. I wish I could just wind you all up, point you in the right direction, and let you go, but it’s not that straightforward. I’ve already risked more, lost more than I ever meant to. And I can’t fix that. I know it maybe won’t make sense, but you’re all too valuable to risk in a war we can’t win, and we _need to win this_.” She rubbed her eyes and a personal truth slipped away from her. “I was supposed to go dancing tonight.”

That, at least, seemed to bring the discussion to an appropriately sympathetic close.

 


	23. Edelweiss

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The following references [Waiting](http://archiveofourown.org/works/2623064)

Scout had once waited at the side of Highway 550 for three hours, to catch a ride into Teufort with Miss Pauling. He had not needed to go to Teufort. He had been lucky she’d even stopped, ecstatic when she had shoved the door of her truck open, beckoned him inside. Rolled her eyes when he’d made a joke about not even needing to show any leg. He’d been twenty-two, and it was the sort of brilliant idea that twenty-two year olds had, the sort that demonstrated complete and total lack of foresight.

Because then he’d needed to sleep in an alley behind the library, and hitchhike back out to the Badlands in the back of another truck headed out to Sawmill.

Worth it, though. At the time, it’d been the longest he’d been alone with Miss Pauling, and she’d been even more fantastic to talk to than she was just to look at. Scout couldn’t remember what had tipped the scales, between Miss Pauling just being the girl from the office, the pretty girl from work that he kind of had a crush on, to being the girl he was in love with. The ride into Teufort had certainly helped. A million little things had helped.

None of them were really helping now. It was hard to remember that none of it was supposed to. Especially when he couldn’t help hoping that somehow she would.

He’d been waiting for nearly as long as he’d waited at the side of the highway, four years ago, before there was a soft knock on the door.

Miss Pauling opened it and peeked around the edge of the doorframe, before he realized he’d just been sitting on the bed,  with his back against the wall, not answering. That the knotted up tension in his stomach and chest was the actual, physical sensation of dread.

“Hey,” her voice was soft, kind. She’d just been so gentle, sweet, the past few days. It was a side of her Scout had never actually imagined that she had. The most delicate thing he’d ever seen her do was pick up the contents of a box full of human teeth that she’d spilled, tripping down the stairs. He’d offered to help, but hadn’t managed to be much use before the process made him dizzy and nauseous in a way that he hadn’t realized that a couple hundred human teeth could. She’d laughed at him a bit, about that. A long time ago. “Can I come in?”

His voice was just gone. Shrugged, nodded.

She didn’t seem put off at all. She crossed the room and sat down, facing him, on the edge of the bed. It was low enough that she was practically crouching. If there’d been springs in the mattress of the cot he’d spent most of his day on, they would have squeaked. Instead it was just a thinly stuffed pad of musty cotton and the room was still too quiet. For her too, apparently.

“Scout, I really don’t know what to say. I’m so sorry.”

God, he wasn’t going to be able to stand it if she blamed herself. There’d been a blood freezing moment, earlier in the day, where he’d almost blamed her. Lying awake, or semi-conscious anyway, while Medic had changed bandages, his Medigun humming, as he sang Edelweiss to himself in German. Scout had wished that Miss Pauling just could’ve stayed where she was supposed to. He could’ve been back in Coal Town, by now. Wouldn’t have found the damn dossier, the one that had made her frightened and fatalistic about its contents. Or the stupid fucking teleporter. Could’ve taught her to dance in the Visitor’s Center. Except, they’d made that date in the middle of the Badlands, under the tension and threat of roaming killer robots, and the portent that hung around the teleporter and Miss Pauling’s dossier. Maybe it wouldn’t have come about otherwise. Hell.

“Don’t...Miss Pauling. It was a stupid...just...fucking stupid. Stupid accident. Ain’t your fault.”

“No. No, I know. Still. God, Scout.” She reached out, took his hand now, the right one, nearest her. She’d done that before. Different now, though, her fingers finding the spaces between his. “You really scared me. I mean, really, _really_ scared me. I haven’t felt like that in years.” Tears in her eyes, a catch in her voice. “I’m sorry. I’m sorry for all of it, every stupid damn thing. Scout, I made so many _mistakes_. This never should’ve happened.”

There was no way in the world this was helping. This was lots worse. “Hey...god, don’t. Aw, hell, Miss Pauling, please.”

“M’sorry,” she was talking through tears now, and she pulled her hand away, wiping her fingers under her glasses. She took them off, coughed, sniffled loudly, trying to compose herself again. Turning her face away, hands on her eyes. “I’m sorry, Scout. I didn’t mean to do this. You don’t need me doing this. Everybody just always thinks I know what I’m doing.”

She was leaning forward now, bowed with her elbows on her knees, hands clasping her glasses in front of her. And there didn’t seem to be anything to do but put his good hand on her shoulder, squeezing it awkwardly. “Hey. Miss Pauling. C’mon, don’t. It’ll be okay. Please don’t.”

Now she raised her head, setting her glasses aside. Her eyes were still wet, and tired, a little bloodshot. Some of the loveliness had gone out of her, she looked more vulnerable than Scout had ever seen her. Her fingers came up, curled around his wrist, lifting his hand, tilting her face to rest her cheek against his palm. She had done this before, he remembered her doing this. Dimly, in the dark. Before it had all unraveled. There hadn’t been cool tears on her cheeks then, and she hadn’t pressed her lips against the inside of his wrist.

But her other hand on his face, though, there had been that. Her fingertips pushing through his hair, sliding down the curve of his jaw, the side of his neck, her thumb lingering in the hollow of his throat. Then leaning forward, moving nearer to him on the bed, pulling his right hand to her waist, her hip. She’d changed, at some point, he realized. She no longer wore the heavy gray sweater, the overalls. She’d found an olive green coverall somewhere in the factory, still too large, but she no longer swam in it. Cool, soft canvas, long broken in by someone other than her. His fingers tightened against the curve of her hip, involuntarily.

Kissing him again, the third time, soft, tentative now. No teeth. She’d changed hands, her left against his cheek, her right had traveled down his chest, then supported her weight on the mattress beside him as she leaned further in. There was a teardrop still clinging to the tip of her nose, touching his cheek. Her breath caught slightly, she kissed him again. Four. Just a hint of teeth. Insistent now, needing, taking. Five, six, seven.

Medic had left a bottle of plain white pills. Two, every four hours, he’d said. No more than that. They made him feel vaguely sick, at first, but they helped some. Apparently the morphine was gone. It felt like it’d been a long time since the last two. Probably more than four hours. In the first twenty minutes after they kicked in, he maybe could’ve handled the pain still radiating through his chest, where his rib had cracked and his lung had half deflated. Could’ve managed to ignore the growing agony in the place where his leg had been. But when she pushed herself up, swung a leg over his hips, Scout couldn’t choke back a pained, resistant gasp, pulling away, pressing back against the wall.

Miss Pauling froze, seemed suddenly to take stock of what she’d been doing, retreated immediately. “Oh, god. Oh, Jesus, I’m sorry. Scout, I’m sorry. I just...it’s you. It’s always been _you_ , Scout, you found me out in the middle of nowhere. And I just wanted...I needed…I’m sorry.”

“S’fine,” he managed, teeth clenched. He’d tensed when she’d leaned against him, it had hurt more than he’d expected. Between the dispenser and what Medic had done earlier, most of the bruised tissue, where he’d hit the ground, had healed, faded from dark bluish to yellow-green in a matter of hours. His bones had started to knit back together, fractures calcifying, callusing over. The worst of the swelling gone down. Most of what hurt was just his brain trying to catch up with his body. There wasn’t anything to be done about the ghost of his leg. Phantom pain, he’d heard that phrase before. He could manage it. If she needed. “It’s okay. The doc left...augh, wait. Just. Pills.”

She was still pulling back, standing now. Turning, towards the door. “No. No, I’m sorry. I shouldn’t…”

He reached out, caught her hand. “C’mere.” Forget the pills. She’d be gentle, and the hell if she wasn’t. Scout hadn’t fallen in love with a girl who was gentle. He’d fallen in love with the girl who had a sign designating her off-limits in that one locker room, had hacked a rattlesnake in half with a shovel in the middle of the desert while they had burned a truckload full of classified documents. Who’d picked him up off the middle of Highway 550 and asked if he had a deathwish when he’d tried to impress her. And she’d hurt him plenty already.


	24. Held Away from Her

She didn’t think he was still pretending to sleep. Not anymore, she was pretty sure he’d actually dropped off by now. He was facing the wall, his left leg tucked up in front of him. Protectively held away from her, even though she’d been especially careful of that. There’d been the bottle of pills on the desk. The dispenser that Engie had set up still hummed quietly a few feet from the bed.  Someone had tucked Scout away in the foreman’s office on the main floor, out of the way, where it was quiet. Warmer, above the boiler room. There still wasn’t enough room for both of them on the cot, not really, but he was skinny and she was small, and each of them made do.

And she’d gotten him a pair of pills, from the desk, afterward. Medic, rather thoughtlessly, had left them out of reach. Scout’s hand had been shaking when she placed two small white tablets in his palm. She _had_ been careful, gentle as she could. But she’d still felt selfish, even though she was just trying to get closer, trying to be sorry. Trying to make up for lost time, prove that it didn’t matter, none of what had happened mattered. That they could be in the middle of something as demanding and complicated as their jobs, as this nonsensical robot war, and it could still work. Still wanted him, needed him.

But then it hadn’t been what she’d thought, and now she had cold, dark doubts gnawing inside her. She’d had to restrain the sense of urgency, _need_ , that threatened to push her forward, too fast. Slow, kind. Other words she hadn’t ever thought of, when she thought of Scout, especially when she thought of Scout _this way_. It had been too muddled up in stress, anxiety, trying to fix things for both of them. Not bad. Not bad in and of itself, not empty. There was a lot between them, and it still counted for _something_.

But It hadn’t _helped_. And even as hollow as she had felt after, even though he’d smiled a tired smile and kissed her, and she’d shyly smiled and kissed him back, she was afraid that she’d left him feeling worse. That it had taken a lot more out of him than it had out of her.

Shit.

A mistake, maybe. Probably. Almost definitely. Because curled up against the small of his back, even knowing he had to be exhausted, sore, starting to feel the effects of those two little pills, she could feel he was still awake. The tension all through his back, too still, like he didn’t know what he was supposed to do with her arms around him. She hadn’t known what to do but hold him closer, nestle her forehead between his shoulderblades. His left arm was in a splint, she had rested her fingers gently on his hand, though he’d tightened it into a fist. She was awake for a long time, waiting for his arm to relax, for his fingers to loosen, go limp beneath hers. Waiting for his breathing to slow down, even out.

Damn it. Oh, damn it.

And he hadn’t called her Edie. That _ached_ inside her. When was the last time he had? It couldn’t have been flat on his back, looking up at her with a smile that had somehow been more genuine than the last one he’d given her. That last one had made her feel like she’d made a mistake. That one had her wanting to leave.

You weren’t supposed to _do that_. You weren’t even supposed to _want_ to do that. Not when you’d gone to somebody, wanting to be held and loved and comforted, not when you’d wanted to do the same for them. That was horrible. She shouldn’t even be sitting up, she should be staying. She was cold, tugging the zipper of the coverall she’d found back up, but that was no excuse. Even if it _was_ cold. Pyro maybe wasn’t running the boilers anymore. Were there blankets anywhere? She needed to go find blankets. Scout was probably cold.

She hadn’t really read the contents of the dossier. Nine pages, tiny type. She had skimmed them. They were still sitting up on the table in the boardroom, as far as she knew. That was a terrible mistake. Classified intelligence, just lying around. It wasn’t the mercs getting into it she was worried about--though sometimes she wondered if she trusted them all too much--but if they were overrun by robots and her nine pages fell into the wrong hands...well. Her page, the tenth page was the most important. She’d kept that, folded up neatly in her pocket. Even so. She really had probably better go.

Miss Pauling had once been told that the difference between an excuse and a reason was that one was for a thing that you didn’t _want_ to do, and the other was a thing you _couldn’t_ do. She wondered if Scout was an excuse or a reason not to do her job.

Well, she couldn’t just leave. No, that would be really terrible. Hurting like he was, and then waking up alone. God, he would wonder why she’d left. He’d be able to tell she thought it was a huge mistake. Scout wasn’t _that_ dumb. So, gently kissing the back of his neck, his jaw. Still careful, gentle. He shivered a little when he woke up, definitely cold. “S’mthin’ wrong?”

“No, no. Shh, I just...I need to go. It’s fine, it’s okay. There’s just...I have work to do.” This was going poorly. Excuses, excuses. “It’s...are you cold? It’s freezing in here. I was going to get some blankets.” Worse and worse. Augh. “Hey. I’m sorry.”

“S’fine. Mm. I’m okay.” He shifted, and she brushed her fingers through his hair. “D’you know the time?”

She shook her head. It was too dark to see her watch, even by the blinking lights of the dispenser. “No. I can find out, I’m sorry.” It’d been probably not more than an hour. For a quarter of that she’d just been listening to him sleep, agonizing. “It’s late, though. I didn’t want to wake you, just...I need to go. And I didn’t want you to be alone in the morning. You know, or whenever.”

“Mmm.”

Scout was not generally difficult to read. But she had no idea about him, right now. Had to go. A reason now, not an excuse. “Okay.” Kissed him. Just a little, because she had to go. “Love you.”

... _Fuck_.

No answer. And she didn’t wait for one. She bolted.


	25. Interlude - Uneasy Alliance

Spy and Heavy had remained in the boardroom. Spy and Heavy had read all the files. Spy, because of course he had. Heavy, because someone had to keep Spy in line, and the best way to do that was to know the same things Spy knew. He couldn’t hold what he knew over your head if you knew it too.

It was an uneasy alliance, owing to the content of the files they’d been presented with. Key pieces were missing. Miss Pauling’s page. All of the most threatening information, all of the most dangerous secrets. The crux(es) of the plan(s).

There were still plenty of interesting details. Beyond just the basics of who the mercs were and what they were accountable for. Secret airfields, caches of weapons, money. Alliances that could be bargained for or bought outright. Who their enemies might be. This was a longer list than expected, with surprising names. Robots were mentioned, but only in passing. Theoretically. On Engineer’s page, in a corner, a suggestion of what strategy he might employ if he decided to go rogue and turn on the rest of them. Most of Dell’s page was useless. Or indecipherable anyway, the diagrams covering it were impenetrable and the math was written so tiny it was nearly impossible to read, even if had been remotely approachable.

They had finished reading through what information they had, and had been sitting in silence for the better part of an hour. The Engineer had long ago fixed the boiler. There was light in the room, but no heat. Both mercenaries were bundled in coats. Heavy was warm enough. Spy was not.

Spy had also run out of cigarettes and was becoming more dangerous by the minute. He hadn’t yet resorted to chewing on it, but he had a pen poised between his index and middle finger. He tapped it on the table before he finally spoke up, “You _do_ understand that she’s becoming something of a liability.”

Heavy grunted, a warning. “I think _you_ understand that you must be very careful how you choose your words to me about Miss Pauling.”

“Spare me. Siberian gulag. Three younger sisters. Dzhugdzhur. _Mikhail_. Protective. I _understand_. But she has the keys to the whole affair, and if she continues to behave like a lovesick child, something _will_ have to be done." Spy nearly lifted the pen to his lips, reflexively. Cursed in French. "You can't tell me you condone this."

"Young people. In their first war, frightened. And desperate, grieving. And in love. You are French, you should not need me to tell you about love." Heavy paused. " _Arnaud._ "

"You are Russian, you should not need _me_ to tell you about war." Spy countered, broodingly.

"It has not yet been much of a war."

Spy snorted. "Do me the courtesy of acknowledging that I know you are smarter than you like it to be believed. You can surely see that it _will_ be. We have a time machine. How many nations--how many _people_ \--would tear the whole world apart for such a thing? A war to undo time? You can't hold to the notion that a contract such as ours is enough for you to risk waging that war."

Heavy was silent a few moments, then chuckled. "Scout said a strange thing."

"The only thing that could be strange about anything Scout could say is that you would consider it to be worth listening to."

"He said he had known us all long enough to know we are not cowards. Bastards, that he would call us in a heartbeat. Cowards, though. That he doesn't believe."

Spy was silent for a few long moments. "Have you ever met a man who is not a coward?"

"Not a if he is a man who has seen a war." Heavy shrugged. "It does not mean anything to you that the least of us believes you and I to be better men than we are?"

"There are cowards and there are fools."

"And bastards."

"And lovesick girls with the keys to it all." Spy attempted to tap ash from the end of the pen he toyed with. "She knows the way out of this. You mark my words, what is promised in these pages? We will need to get out, beyond the cordon. She says she will not hold what she knows against us? Then what assurance does she have that we will come back with what she asks?"

"Only the belief that we are neither cowards nor bastards."


	26. Digging In

_You can talk to Dell. He said you could, he said you oughta want to. He said you couldn’t say anything wrong. He’s here. He has been making awkward small talk for goddamn half an hour, pretending he needs to fix that dumbass dispenser. You don’t ever_ really  _talk with anybody who ain’t Pyro, anybody who might say something actually useful back. You are a goddamn cripple and a coward, say_ something _, you idiot._

“Umm.”

“Hmm?” Engie had brought food. Not _good_ food, but MannWorks had employees when it wasn’t having a war waged for it, and locker rooms and a cafeteria and showers. First aid supplies. Nothing like the heavy duty painkillers Scout might’ve wanted, but he was needing them less already. HIs ribs were already mostly mended. It had only been two days. Medic had rebandaged his leg, and Scout hadn’t been able to bring himself to watch, but the doctor had made noises of vague approval, and it no longer leaked blood and iodine through the bandages.

Scout was sitting up in bed, picking at a can of what he hoped were beans. He had been hungry, sort of, but lacked an appetite. “I dunno. I wasn’t paying attention, didja mention much about what you all’ve been up to? What’m I missing?”

Dell looked up with a weird expression on his face. Like he had to sneeze but couldn’t. “Hell, boy.” He grinned irrepressibly. “You mean besides the leg?”

“Fuck you, that is _not_ fucking funny.” He was angry for only a moment, then the flash of fire was swallowed up by hurt. “Shit. Fuckin’ christ. What the hell, Engie. That was fuckin’ _mean_.”

“Sorry.” He didn’t stop smiling, though. “Was a _little_ funny.”

“Fuck off.”

Dell was sitting on the floor, long finished with whatever he had been pretending the dispenser needed done with it. “Oh, because it ain’t a little funny any time one of you bastards asks me for a hand?” He held up his gloved fingers, wiggled them.

“S’different.“

Dell nodded. “Well, ‘course it is. But it’s a little bit the same, too.”

“...does it...it doesn’t still _hurt_ , does it?” Scout had known, vaguely, that Engie had lost a hand. He didn’t know how, had never really cared. “How long before it healed? Y’said this’d get better faster than it would normally, an’ I get that...but. Uh. I dunno. Medic gave me pills, but they--” He had to stop, choked up a little. It took a minute to get past that. “Doesn’t help. Arm’s better, ribs’re better. But _this_...hurts, still. Like a lot. Ways it maybe ain’t supposed to, I don’t know. Burning and cold and _needles_. Fuckin’...M-Medic. He didn’t do something funny, did he? I don’t remember a lot, I been so fucked up. I didn’t wanna ask him. I can’t even look when he’s here. God.”

“Phantom pain, you mean.” Engie’s smile had gone, he just looked solemn now. “It’ll never really go. I mean, the pain gets less. But your brain don't like givin' up on the way it sees the world that easily. Always gonna have a memory of it, like a ghost. Gonna get better, s'matter of just getting used to it, in some ways. It’s a funny ol’ thing. Medic might actually be who you wanna talk to about it. He didn’t do anything he weren’t meant to, I was there the whole time. He’s a twisted ol’ bastard, but he is a goddamn genius. He might be able to explain it, might help.”

Scout didn’t think this was a good idea, but it would have been possible to talk him into it, if there hadn’t been a knock on the door. Soft, gentle. In a way that made him feel cold inside, a way he was starting to hate. He’d frozen the last time she’d knocked and remembered that, and could feel Dell staring at him. So he looked up, grinned a little. Hoped it didn’t look forced. “Miss Pauling.”

“You called her something else, before.” Engie had a mind like a steel trap. Not a lot slipped out of it.

 _Fuck. Shit, fuck, god fucking damn it. Yeah. I did_. “Y-yeah. Her name. Shouldn’t have repeated it, ain’t polite.” It was something of a taboo among the mercs, to use their given names without explicit permission.

Dell was still staring at him, silent, calculating. “You want me to tell her to come back later? I don’t mind, there’s some things you and I need to discuss.”

“Yeah...no, I mean. No. It’s okay. I ain’t...she left. Last night. We shoulda talked, we...fuck. No, fuck, never mind. She can come in. S’fine.” None of this sounded convincing. “I wanna see her. Please.”

“Ain’t up to me, son. Whatever you say.”

Dell got up, clapped Scout on the shoulder, then crossed the room and opened the door for Miss Pauling. They had some friendly, casual exchange. Scout had stopped listening, internally attempting to crush the part of him that felt chilled by the sight of her. What the fuck. This was awful. The door closed. Dell was gone.

“Hey.” Again with the softness of her voice, the gentle tone that he hadn’t ever heard her use before all this had happened. God, fucking unbearable.

But he looked up, and she was still lovely. It was dim in the room, there wasn’t a window, and the only lamp in the room wasn’t terribly bright. Edie. Edith Amelia. With the soft dark hair, pretty green eyes. With the sort of shy half smile when she thought something was funny, and the snort at the end of her laugh if she thought something was hilarious. That embarrassed the hell out of her. Scout could probably count on one hand the number of times he’d made her laugh like that, but the memory of it made him feel a little better, in spite of himself. She was awkward, standing by the door. He had a better look at the coverall she’d been wearing last night. It didn’t fit her, not much better than her sweater and overalls from the warehouse had. Every time Miss Pauling came out to the Badlands, she always seemed juxtaposed against a world that was too big for her. Part of him had always loved how small she was. She seemed somehow smaller than usual. He seemed not to love her any more than usual.

“I’m sorry I left. Last night. There’s...god. There’s so much I need to do, I shouldn’t have…”  She took a shaky breath, shook her head, held her arms closer around herself. Trailed off, looked lost.

So much for feeling better. _Change the subject. Something else, fucking robots. Goddamn fucking file, goddamn teleporter, lost your fucking leg, goddamn wreck and cripple for it._ “Don’t worry about it. About me. There's the thing. File. With the teleporter. I know it’s important.”

“Well, so are you.”

 _Fuck_.

“You’re the one said the thing needed to be burnt to hell, an’ you along with it, if we got caught. I ain’t _that_ important.” _Holy Mother of Christ._ _I am fucking terrible._ “Shit. Listen, I didn’t mean…”

She still had that lost-looking smallness about her. “It’s okay.” She hesitated. “Can I sit?”

“Sure.”

At the edge of the bed, with her hands twisted in her lap. “I just wanted to say hello. I haven’t seen you all day, I’ve been so busy. Are you feeling better? Did Engie help?”

 _I feel like shit and I hate everybody._ “Yeah. Better. Him’n Medic.”

“I’m glad.”

 _Well, that makes one of us. No, Christ. I don’t mean that. Stop. God, fucking stop, it’s not her fault. Not her fault,  not even_ your _fault, stupid fucking accident., crippled coward bastard wreck._ “What...what’re you busy with? God, I got no idea what’s going on out there. We ain’t...I haven’t heard any fighting, but maybe I wouldn’t have? Jesus, I barely know where the hell I am.”

She shifted closer, pulled her legs up. Smaller still. “MannWorks. The foreman’s office.” She paused, then, helpfully. “It’s Saturday. There hasn’t been anything. Sniper’s keeping a watch, Soldier and Pyro are keeping up a perimeter. Medic and Engie have set up a lab, they’ve been doing some work for me. I don’t know where Spy is, but that’s typical. Heavy and Demo have been getting the place fortified, barricading doors, blocking up windows. Digging in, I guess. I hope we don’t have to run.”

 _They better leave me here. If they gotta bug out, nobody’d better fucking touch me. Anybody tries and I’ll kill him._ “Oh. Diggin’ in. Was that...is that because of what’s in the file? I mean...if you can’t tell me, s’fine. Just. I know it’s important. Are we gonna get out? Is that what the teleporter’s for?”

Miss Pauling looked up, bit her lip. Unfolded a bit, reached over to put a hand on his knee. “I don’t need you to worry about that. I’m working on it, it’ll be okay. Please, don’t worry. I don’t want that.”

“I dunno how you figure I’m gonna be able not to worry about that.” _What it cost me, what you said I had to_ do _. Burn you, Jesus, I couldn’t have._ “I just... never known you to talk like you did. About the damn file. Not enough to burn it, would’ve had to burn _you_? How...what the hell. What could be so bad?”

This had been the wrong thing to say, because she was tearing up again, like before. But not just a little misty, really crying now. _Oh, god_. Reaching a hand out, shifting herself closer still and leaning in, like she wanted to be held. Well, what else was he supposed to do?

And then just a little swell of the way it used to be, with her. Reaching out to gather her in, close and warm, remembering the way she really was, so that her smallness became a secret thing again. Usually hidden by her competence and her cheerfulness, by the work she had to do. The Badlands were oversized for her, but somehow Miss Pauling had always managed to seem a thousand feet tall anyway. She was small, yes, but that didn’t matter, she was too busy to be small. It became something that only showed up when she let her guard down, when she trusted someone.

That could be better, that could be okay. He could still hold her, he’d been wanting to do that practically since the day they’d met. And now she fit up against him like she belonged there, her pretty, perfect face against his shoulder, pulling up her knees, curling up against his hip. Still crying, just tired and stressed. She’d been gone all day and most of the night before that. She’d woken him up in the middle of the night to say say that she had to go. Of course she was tired. “Edie. Hey, Edie. Aww, honey. C’mere. Shh.”

She sniffled, turned her head, looked up. “I’m sorry. I’m sorry I had to ask...about...with the file. Burning me. I knew it would be hard. I’m so sorry. I w-wish--I wish I hadn’t.”

“You gotta know I wouldn’t...listen. I wouldn’t have let anything happen t’you. I swear to god, Edie, there could’ve been a hundred of ‘em, there’s no way I woulda let ‘em _touch_ you. I would’ve kept you safe.” _I can’t, anymore. Someone else’s gonna have to, can’t be up to me now. Goddamn crippled, useless. But I_ wasn’t, _and I_ could’ve _, then. Please don’t forget that about me. I hope to Christ it still counts for something._

“No...you couldn’t have. It wouldn’t have mattered.” She paused, put a hand on his chest, pushed away, biting her lip. “No, that’s not...I’m sorry. I meant…”

 _I know what you meant. Fuck, I wish I didn’t know what you meant._ “S’fine.”

“I was just--I was scared. I’m still scared, but...Scout, there’s so much I have to _do_.” She buried her face in his chest again, clung a little tighter, like that would make up for it. “I don’t want to. I don’t know where to start, I can’t. I want to stay here.” She turned her face up again, with her big, teary green eyes. “I’m sorry I left, last night. And...w-what I said. I didn’t mean for it...I didn’t mean to just leave. I want to stay, can I stay? I love you.”

It had been the last thing she’d said, the last time she’d left. He’d been half asleep, he’d thought he’d dreamt it, imagined it. It had still stung, somehow, for some godawful reason he couldn’t even begin to process. It was worse now, that same cold feeling that welled up from inside him, when her voice was soft, gentle. When she seemed to feel sorry for him.

Scout wasn’t sure he could stand her feeling sorry him.

But he didn’t know what to do, except bury his face in her hair, breathe her in, and murmur, “Yeah. ‘Course you can stay.”


	27. Improbably Out of Sync

Approximately six years and five days into their relationship, and they’d had their first real fight. Tuesday was apparently a good day for fighting. Miss Pauling had argued for an hour with Spy about the plan that was coalescing and his part in it. She’d already been in a fine temper when she’d thrown her hands up, and gone stomping off to see Scout. She’d wanted to complain, to get some sympathy, to have a hug and a kiss and be helped to feel better. To take five minutes and not have to be a girl attempting to boss around a crew of increasingly recalcitrant and antsy mercenaries. Soldier had already needed to be stopped from organizing a charge against the robots. He had nearly convinced Pyro and Demo to join in. If Scout had been able, he would have gone along with it in a heartbeat. They all would’ve gotten themselves killed out of impatience.

It apparently hadn’t even needed to be a fight about anything particularly. Or had it? She couldn’t remember if he’d set her off or she’d set him off, and of course he had plenty to be mad about. Scout had already been angry with Demo for trying to bully him out of his room. Maybe Scout hadn’t wanted her to take his side about that. Maybe he needed a little nudge out the door, maybe he didn’t want to be told he’d really been hurt and he should take as much time as he needed to recover. Maybe that had been it. She hadn’t thought it was a big deal.

It was amazing he hadn’t snapped at her sooner, but then she’d snapped back and then they’d just been shouting. Loud, public. Embarassing. Heavy had broken it up by opening the door, uninvited, coming in and picking her up off her feet. He took her outside, put her down. Stepped back inside, presumably for a word with Scout. Miss Pauling’s face had already been flushed red from humiliation and anger, so she had burst into humiliated, angry tears, and fled.

So, their first fight. A little part of her thought it was probably good for him. The larger part of her was just crying in the stairwell down to the boiler room. She had been going to go to Pyro for some sympathy, but she’d lost steam halfway there, sat down on the stairs. Stupid. Really stupid, god, she was _mad_. There was so much she needed to do. She’d just wanted a little break, just five minutes off. Miss Pauling had Demo building and planting mines all around MannWorks. _That_ was going to be a nightmare when they got this all unsnarled. Sniper and Soldier were out doing reconnaissance and she hoped she hadn’t made a mistake in putting them together. She hoped they would both come back. She hoped the minefield would be easily navigable by non-robots.

Engie and Medic were sharing a lab, actually the kitchen off the break room, which was a state of affairs guaranteed either to double or to halve their productivity. It was supposed to have been her next destination. Miss Pauling sniffled, rubbed her eyes. She really needed to talk to Dell. To Medic, too. She needed to get Spy to cooperate, it was getting to be crucial. There was only so much more she was going to be able to do, from where she was. She was going to need to leave. She really didn’t want to.

Composure. Miss Pauling tilted her head back against the concrete wall behind her. Two weeks on her own, trying to figure this out herself. She’d been composed that entire time, even in spite of being scared and tired and alone. She hadn’t had anyone to lean on, and that had been fine. That had been her natural state of being, she was used to working alone.

She had made a mistake. Sometimes Miss Pauling didn’t listen. Sometimes she thought she knew best. The Administrator had told her to get to the warehouse, to find the teleporter and the dossier. Miss Pauling had gone into the mineshafts instead.

The mineshafts were like her second workplace. Miss Pauling dug a lot of graves. If you went down far enough, the mineshafts under Coal Town were like a massive, pre-dug grave. Sometimes Miss Pauling got lazy. They were pretty much abandoned, except for the occasional wayward group of tourists who thought they might be interesting. The mercs avoided them like the plague. Partially because sometimes Miss Pauling got bored with her job, and sometimes Miss Pauling made mummies. As a hobby. New Mexico was dry, quicklime didn’t actually work as advertised, and she thought mummies were neat. She knew her way around the mineshafts like the back of her hand. She’d marked key tunnels with particularly good mummies. Miss Pauling liked thrift stores. So some of them had quirky hats.

Six levels straight down from the shaft outside of Big Rock, a left down Top Hat’s shaft, a right at the one with Bunny Ears. Two levels up, then you’d run into a fork at Brown Derby and Fedora. Fedora was there to mark a tunnel that led to a sheer, empty drop off. Avoid Fedora at all costs. Brown Derby led to a tunnel that sloped upward, long, gradual. Came out about four miles away. Coal Town was a silly place. The mineshafts beneath it were utterly preposterous. But she loved them. And that had been where she’d fled, when a wall of steel had started to close in.

The Administrator needed her. She’d been convinced of that. Miss Pauling had worked for her for six years, and the last words she’d heard from her had been desperate. The Administrator was never desperate. The Administrator was always composed.

Miss Pauling had stocked the mineshafts with more than just mummies. She had guns and ammo and food and supplies and she could hide out and she could escape and she could get to the Administrator. She had taken her time, spent a few days in scheming, planning. Her boss needed her. Miss Pauling could help.

It had been late October. The Badlands were still clinging to the last vestiges of summer warmth. Miss Pauling had armed herself. Packed a bag with what she considered to be the essentials. Took the right turn at Brown Derby. Trekked four miles uphill to the mouth of the tunnel, outside Hightower.

By her watch it should have been midday, by the time she emerged. The Badlands around Hightower had been in full, glorious bloom, the way they only were after a rain in late spring. It had been properly warm. It had been sunrise. It had been beautiful. It had been terribly wrong.

She had stared out at the world around her, improbably out of sync with what she’d thought was reality, and then she’d scrambled back down the tunnel. Miss Pauling had had her worldview significantly jarred. She had no way of knowing if the spring outside was the spring subsequent or the spring prior to her October world, so she wasn’t sure if she was running forward or backward in time, back into the circle encompassed by the robots. But she ran all the way back to her little bolthole in the mineshafts. She had squirreled away a bottle of rum in case of emergencies and this was an emergency. She had a night of semi-drunken existential crisis. She had a hangover in the morning. She resolved to do what she’d been told to.

And when she’d found them, she hadn’t told the mercs that they were trapped in an impossible bubble, a couple months out of sync with the rest of the world. A couple months at least.  HIghtower had looked the same as ever, but she hadn’t looked closely. It was hard to tell, in the Badlands, with the dryness of the climate, things took their sweet time in decaying.  Maybe a couple years. Maybe a couple decades, for all she knew. What it meant and what she was supposed to do about it, she didn’t know. Whether time had slowed or stopped or just been displaced was entirely beyond her faculties, even with six years of experience doing her ridiculous job. How far down did it go? How far up? Just _how_? _Why_? The questions were not ones that could be answered by her fragmented and cobbled together collegiate career, across three schools, none of which had really specialized in higher physics.

She’d wondered if it might just be best to pretend to be surprised, when she had to take the mercs out of it.

Miss Pauling was a liar. Professionally, habitually, personally. She fabricated lies, and she lied by omission. Most of her lies were lies to keep secrets, but they were lies all the same.  She lied to protect people, to protect the Administrator, Mann Co. A lot of times she lied to protect the team, from the inside and from the outside. That was just her job. After six years, though, maybe her job was more than just a job. Maybe it had found its way into her habits and into her personality. Was her composure a lie? It was starting to feel like it. She was sitting in a stairwell, still sniffling, because somewhere along the line something had cracked her smooth, serene veneer of professionalism, and now that crack was spidering across the surface of her, threatening to expose her personal life.

Miss Pauling would be lying to herself if she pretended she didn’t know exactly what it was. Exactly who.

  
  



	28. Hightower

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The following references [Miss Pauling Goes to the Zoo](http://archiveofourown.org/works/2609555)

_I gotta talk to someone. I really gotta talk to someone, I dunno who or how. Is anyone even paying attention to me? Why am I stuck in here? They could all just leave and I would never even know. I'm gonna go crazy. I_ am _going crazy. I wanna talk to Dell, but he's just so goddamn busy. I can't talk to fuckin' Medic, I tried, but he's just gonna make me feel like a goddamned crippled idiot. I am a goddamned crippled idiot. They are all so fucking busy and I am useless. I yelled at Miss Pauling. I thought Heavy was gonna kill me. Pop my goddamn head off, Jesus, I yelled at Miss Pauling. I wish Pyro would come by. Stupid mute mutant freak, but at least he listens._

Except he didn’t know where Pyro was. Scout didn’t know where anyone was, or what they were doing or why they were doing it, whatever it was. He wasn’t made for staying cooped up anywhere, and he was going crazy. He hadn’t seen anyone in hours. The last person he’d seen had been Medic.

_Fucking Medic, cut off my fuckin’ leg. Find him, fuckin’ kill him._

Medic kept moving that damn bottle of pills. Miss Pauling kept putting it by the bed, where he could reach it. She had taken to poking her head in, every four hours, to remind him to take a couple. She was busy too. It was sweet that she took the time.

_Sweet does me no fucking good. I am not a goddamn baby. I am not a fucking child who needs looking after._

But Medic kept moving it back, to the desk on the other side of the room.

_They didn’t help, anyway. Don’t help._

The last person he’d spoken to had been Heavy. The last person he’d yelled at had been Miss Pauling. He’d really, really needed to yell at somebody. Demo had been by, and probably he should have yelled at Demo instead. She’d really been in the wrong place at the wrong time.

_This whole fucking thing. Wrong place, wrong time, wrong goddamn time for all of it._

Engie had packed up his dispenser yesterday, Monday. Scout had all the way healed. Medic had said so. He hadn’t even brought his medigun, hadn’t even looked under the bandages. Said there wasn’t even any scar tissue, not really. It had only taken a few days, it would have taken minutes if it had happened in the field, back before the world had ended. Would have taken months--years, maybe--if it had happened before he’d started this damn job. Or after he’d left it. Scout had never imagined leaving it.

_Leaving it now, left it now. What the hell. It’s over, I’m done. Fuck, I loved this job. Jesus, I have to go home. I don’t know how to...I haven’t told my ma. Ain’t talked to my ma in weeks, barely even thought about her. I dunno how to tell her. I dunno how to call her, fucking thank Christ, because I don’t wanna tell her, she’s gonna feel so bad. She’s gonna want me to come home and I don’t **want** to go home. I don’t want to go back crippled and broken and useless. I am gonna get so much shit from my stupid goddamn brothers. I am gonna have to sell my bike and buy a wheelchair. I am never gonna get another goddamn dog, I’m never gonna be good enough for another dog. What the hell does a dog want with somebody can’t run around, chase baseballs with him in the park? _

Even if it had all healed, it still hurt. Not the way it _had_ , true. Medic had taken the splint off his arm days ago, tapped with two fingers and a stethoscope on Scout’s chest, and left satisfied. That hadn’t hurt. But the way Engie had said it would, like that. Like he couldn't imagine. He couldn’t imagine the empty space where his leg had been. All he could imagine was the way it had felt when it had broken, pain lingering like smoke in the air. The memory of it seemed to be stuck, clinging in the empty place like some kind of monster. Getting at him with talons and teeth.

_This is never going to go away. Engie said. This is never going to stop. I’m just gonna have a broken ghost leg for the rest of my life. Oh god. I am going to hurt for the rest of my life. I don’t want to. I can’t. This is the worst thing that's ever happened to me. This ain't fair. It was never supposed to be like this._

A couple years ago, he’d had a bad day out at Hightower. A really bad day, full of bad luck and violent, painful death. Hightower was a challenge, he had fallen from Hightower, once before. Very early in his career. Never again, after that. He had been cocky and stupid and he’d been showing off, and he’d fallen over six stories, and he’d killed himself. It wasn’t the impact he remembered, but the falling. The long, slow sensation of falling. The feeling you dreamt about, from the very back of your brain, primal. The feeling that woke you up with a panicked jerk, gasping. Scout dreamt that feeling a lot more often, since the time he’d fallen off Hightower. But that hadn't been the bad day.

On the bad day, he had just been getting really sick of his job. Sick of the monotony, sick of feeling like he had peaked and then plateaued. Caught up in, distracted, by the pointlessness of it all. He’d been at it for four years at that point. Four years was longer than he’d ever done anything, as far as he could remember. It had sort of made him feel like he really hadn’t done anything with his life, if this was all he was good for. A bad day, an off day. Distracted. And a distracted target was an easy target, and that day out at Hightower had been, and remained, his personal record for the number of times he’d been killed in a day. Bad enough that the rest of the team hadn’t even given him shit about it, Sniper had shot him six times, just because Scout had made it easy. The Australian hadn't apologized, but he _had_ asked if Scout was all right. Scout hadn’t wanted to talk about it.

Scout had gotten over his fear of Hightower by aggressively spending a _lot_ of time at Hightower. He had taught himself, vindictively, to _love_ Hightower. Scout had learned to love the heights for the thrill they gave him, learned the love the view, learned to be careful. And at the end of it, once he’d learned every nook and cranny of Hightower, it was probably one of his favourite places in the world.  At the end of the bad day, he’d decided just to hang around, try to clear his head. The sunset was phenomenal, out at Hightower. There were beers in the fridge. He could hog the showers in the locker room, just relax for a while without anybody bugging him. The showers at Hightower were hot. And Miss Pauling was supposed to come pick up her briefcase. Even if she only hung around for five minutes, that was worth waiting around Hightower for.

Miss Pauling had been late. Scout had climbed up to watch for her, because Miss Pauling generally wasn’t late. He was getting a little worried, but then she came trudging up the hill, tiny and far away on the ground. Looking a little lost. He’d watched her for just a few moments. Then he’d brightened up a bit, and yelled hello.

Scared her. Even from that high up, he’d seen her hand fly to her mouth and the way she quailed slightly, looking up at him. Maybe Miss Pauling didn’t like heights. He should’ve thought of that.

Back on the ground, she’d yelled at him. She’d been dusty and disheveled and she hadn’t come puttering up the road on her little purple scooter, it had broken down.  Scout realized before she’d even said so that maybe she was having a bad day. It had made him feel better. Actually a lot better. Not because she’d had a bad day, not quite that. But that Miss Pauling had bad days too. And that he could help with that.

And then it had just been the best night ever, for about a billion reasons. But mostly because she’d stayed longer than she needed to, and they’d just talked, like friends. And then he’d remembered about how she was absolutely the best part of his job.

This was kind of like Hightower all over again.

_What the hell. I beat Hightower._

 


	29. Intelligent Guesswork

It was Spy who cornered her this time. She had been stalking him relentlessly before now, before their argument, and then her stupid, shouted fight with Scout. Miss Pauling wasn’t sure if it was the former or the latter that had her cowering in the basement stairwell. She hadn’t managed to summon the resolve to drag herself back to the confrontation with Spy. She hadn’t even managed to drag herself out of the stairwell.

Miss Pauling had privately been hoping someone would come along to talk to her. She had hoped it would be Heavy, embarrassed though she was, or Demo. She hadn’t hoped that it _wouldn’t_ be Spy, but now that he was staring down at her, she felt a sudden dread of a conversation she could already imagine. He seemed especially tall and narrow from the top of the stairs. Her eyes were still rimmed red and she felt young and stupid and like she wasn’t supposed to be in charge. And small. Very, very small. So before he could say anything, she spoke up, not even trying to sound like she wasn’t both very small and very tired.

“You _know_ I don’t know what I’m doing,” Miss Pauling said, before he could tell her so. “I know you can tell, I know you _all_ can tell. I hate this. I hate all of this, I never wanted any of it. There’s no good reason anyone should expect me to be in charge. I’m half your age. Aren’t I? At _least._ No offense. It's just I'm the youngest person here. I’m supposed to clean up the messes, I don’t _belong_ in the middle of them.”

Spy’s expression was unreadable. He was good at that. Miss Pauling was not. The familiar pressure of tears threatened her tenuous composure again, and she sighed, folded her arms atop her knees, and hid her face. She heard the strike of a match and after a few moments there was the scent of cigarette smoke.

"I have combed this entire building, the whole of the factory and found only a half package of terrible American cigarettes,” Spy commented, and lowered himself to sit down at the top of the stairs. It was an awkward posture for him, his knees drawn up almost comically. "Nevertheless, courtesy dictates that I am obliged to offer you one."

Miss Pauling shook her head. "You know I don't smoke."

"This is why I feel safe in offering. I will spare you the hellish torment of tar and some hideous filler. I suspect cheap cardboard." He drew a long drag of smoke into his lungs and then choked on it viciously. With an exasperated sigh he flicked the still burning cigarette into the stairwell, watching morosely as it bounced off the concrete. “Miss Pauling, I am old enough to be your father. I have been a spy in one capacity or another, for powers great and small, for the whole of your lifetime. There is something widely believed about spies, and it is that we are liars by nature. This is far from so, I personally am a man who is concerned with the truth above most else. I am also a _patient_ man, and I have a great respect for liars--but I am now three days from my last proper cigarette and I have lost two weeks of my existence. We are reaching a point where I begin to be _very_ concerned about the truth of my situation, Miss Pauling."

She found herself wondering if he was trying to _sound_ like her father. Miss Pauling shuddered at this thought, because she felt small on the stairs below him, but she’d never felt smaller than when her father had called her up onto the carpet in front of the massive desk in his study, and upbraided her for trespasses that had seemed world-ending at the time, but were trivial in hindsight, with the benefit of age and independence and distance from her family. Her father had just been an intensely critical man, when he could be bothered to take an interest in her at all. Miss Pauling glanced up at Spy and hoped he wasn’t feeling fatherly. She didn’t know what to say and shrugged, managing a weary laugh. “It’s a mess. What more do you need to know?”

Spy withdrew another cigarette from the small, battered carton that he’d found in his search of the factory. This one he didn’t bother to light, but toyed with rather morosely. Of course he’d searched the factory. Miss Pauling hadn’t thought to tell him to do so, or to do it herself. She told herself that she'd been busy. “It may be that I know a great deal already. It would have been irresponsible not to have at least done some intelligent guesswork. There are three things, most of all, that I believe to be true.” He leaned forward. “The foremost is that you know _precisely_ what you are _meant_ to be doing, Miss Pauling.”

This had been the first thing she'd said to him, and she balked slightly, about to protest, but some tiny, annoying voice at the back of her mind agreed that he was right. Her page from the dossier, and its short note from the Administrator.

_Miss Pauling, if you are reading this, then I am dead._

But, more crucially:

_Instructions to follow._

That was what you were supposed to do with instructions. And she hadn’t. It was a bold faced lie that she didn't know what she was doing--because how couldn’t she, when she had a clear and detailed outline of what she was meant to do and various ways in which she might do it. The first page was still tucked in her pocket and her hand slipped inside, pulling it out and smoothing it over her knees. She’d only read it once, and even then she’d really only skimmed it. She seemed to get stuck on that first line. Miss Pauling hadn’t known, before she’d found it, that the Administrator was dead. “...she...she called me. The Administrator. I think I was the last person to talk to her a-and...I didn’t know it, then. She sounded so desparate. I’ve _never_ heard her sound that way before.”

“You worked for her for many years,” Spy remarked. “She was only ever a voice to us. Naturally she would have meant more to you. I imagine no one has offered their condolences for your loss.”

Miss Pauling hadn’t thought about it as a loss. As _her_ loss, especially, because who else was there who would be lost without the Administrator? She'd been numb and shocked and horrified with herself for having made the mistakes she had, she hadn’t really allowed the idea to penetrate. It seemed too impossible to even consider. The Administrator was a titanic force of a woman, steely-eyed and iron-willed. Miss Pauling has always known better than to press for the actual details, but her employer had always seemed beyond the scope of the spurious conflict she oversaw. The notion that she had been reached by some kind of violence made Miss Pauling feel sick inside. She hadn’t thought about it before, but she was thinking about it now. About the way her employer had sounded desperate. Maybe even frightened. Something was badly wrong in a world where the Administrator could be frightened.

Miss Pauling was acutely aware of just how clearly Spy could read the emotions that played through her, and she pushed her glasses up and dropped her face into her hands. "I failed her," she murmured, not crying but wanting to. "Oh god, I-I should have done what she said. I thought I could help her, I didn't know she...she _expected_ to be killed, and I was the last person she--if I could've _done_ something…"

"If she expected to be killed, Miss Pauling, then I doubt there was anything you could have done. I'm sure her wishes beyond death are a heavy burden." Spy's tone had grown uncharacteristically gentle now, and she felt a slight pressure on her shoulder as he reached over, comforting. She tensed slightly. She hadn't intended to let herself be this vulnerable in her next encounter with Spy, tired and frustrated or not.

"Is that supposed to be your intelligent guesswork?"

Spy shrugged. "Merely an observation. Guesswork tells me something far more crucial, because I believe you know a way out of the trap we seem to have been snared in. Why you haven't taken it, is what I cannot fathom."

Warily, she lifted her head again. "It's complicated. You know I need your help. You haven't exactly been cooperative."

This had Spy leaning forward, his eyes glinting, "There _is_ a way out, then. I may not have been cooperative, Miss Pauling, but you have been _far_ from forthcoming about our present situation."

That was true. But when had she ever been honest? It wasn't her job to be honest. "Everyone else trusts me."

"Then everyone else has severely underestimated you. I am beginning to feel the first real stirrings of nicotine withdrawal, and you may find me increasingly tractable if the possibility exists that I may quit this unfortunate trap and acquire some decent cigarettes."

Miss Pauling blinked at him. "That can't seriously be all it would take."

Spy shrugged. "Your full attention would encourage me further. Everyone else seems to consider you entitled to a certain...distraction. I think this is unwise and unprofessional, and I thought better of you than to expect it. I do _want_ to help you, Miss Pauling. However, I know when I am needed, and it would be foolish not to leverage that position. The more you keep from me the less I'll trust you. Lie to the others as much as you like, but please do not continue to insult me so. Information, as always, is the way into my confidences. Tell me the truth of our situation, and I am your man."

He wasn't going to like it. Spy had balked at the notion of manipulating time, well, it was too late now, whether he approved or not. Hightower had been in full spring blossom at the end of the passage out, beyond the cordon. They had all lost a lot more than two weeks by Miss Pauling’s reckoning. And that wasn't even the worst of it. Her eyes drifted down the page in her lap and she chewed her lower lip."You won't like it."

"It's not as though that would be a marked change from anything else about our present situation."

He had a point.

And she was tired. She didn't want to be in charge, she didn't want to follow the instructions she'd been given. Spy wasn't going to like it, and she knew that with certainty, because _she_ didn't. But she smoothed the page over her knees again, stared at it blankly, then sighed and handed it over.

Spy read quickly. Miss Pauling imagined that was probably a necessity in his profession, that he could read and absorb information quickly. Still, she watched his eyes travel down the page once, then twice. There was a slight twitch of his lips, a narrowing of his eyes. He read it again. Then he put it aside and lit a cigarette, and this one he smoked slowly and in silence, still sitting hunched at the top of the stairs. Finally he spoke, "I have many questions," he began, turning his cigarette slowly between his fingers, "but only one seems crucial at the moment--the man who has done this--Gray. He is worse than the woman we work for. The woman who would ask this of you,  the only defense you can offer of this course of action is that she has been killed by someone _worse_. Do you believe that?"

Miss Pauling nodded. Hesitantly she reached for the page again, folded it back up and returned it to her pocket. "Yes. I think so, yes. He is. I don't know what he was after or--or why he had to kill her. This...it's...I think it's bigger than the Badlands."

"Then we need to go. Your way out, I suspect it is through the mineshafts? I can be prepared to leave by nightfall, and if you tell him what it is you require, Medic will be willing to leave immediately. We will supply ourselves as best we can from the factory, and we will leave once it's dark."

This made her stomach twist slightly with anxiety. "...what, tonight? So soon?"

Spy extended a hand to help her up and she accepted it, hesitating only briefly. She still felt small as he looked down at her, nearly a foot taller than she was, and old enough to be her father. "Three weeks late, by my estimate. You _are_ allowed to be frightened. You are not a mercenary, nor are you made for war. There's no shame in that." He paused and in the beat of silence she seemed to sense him making a decision. "I will sound a terrible cynic, Miss Pauling, and I hope you'll consider this advice, rather than criticism, from a colleague--but it seems to me you believe it might be easier to be in love than to be in charge. That you've found a reason not to do your job. Don't use the boy as an excuse, whatever your feelings are, they are not a place for you to hide yourself away from your responsibilities."

It felt like she'd been caught at something, the way her heart seemed to skip and she felt suddenly transparent, like she'd told a lie and it hadn't fooled anyone. "That--that isn't...I'm not..." Miss Pauling's cheeks were growing warm and her glasses were smudged with dried salt from when she'd been teary-eyed. She pulled them off and rubbed them with her too-long sleeves, trying to figure out what to say. Excuses and reasons, and how terrible she was at telling the difference. "I don't think that's any of your business," she said finally, stiffly, replacing her glasses on her nose.

"The affairs of others are the very definition of 'my business', Miss Pauling," Spy replied dryly, but held his hands up in a conciliatory gesture. "Consider it a piece of advice from someone who has made your mistake, and take or leave it as you like."

Unexpectedly, the word _mistake_ made her blanch slightly, and she bit her lip, fearful that she knew exactly what Spy had meant. She'd made plenty of mistakes. She hadn't thought Scout was one of them. Before she could work up the courage to ask Spy for any further advice, he continued brusquely as he took her arm and led her away from the basement stairwell, back toward the factory proper.

"I would suggest that you take this time to go and speak with Medic, and then to go about your preparations for our departure."

"R-right. Okay. I have a supply cache in the mineshafts, I'll start to make a list of what we might need."

Spy smiled at her, just slightly, encouraging. "Very good, Miss Pauling."

In spite of the rising anxiety, there was something else, a thrill of excitement at being galvanized to action. Miss Pauling smiled back. She'd wasted a lot of time, but what did time matter? She had a time machine, and she had a _plan_. She knew what she was doing. It felt good to move forward. It had felt good to tell the truth, to share the burden of her responsibility with someone else, to accept help when it was offered.

Although, Miss Pauling wondered, as she and Spy parted ways to go about their respective preparations, what exactly he had meant by "her mistake." Whether it was the same mistake that a tiny voice warned her she might be making, as she took a detour on her way to see Medic, to look in on Scout.

It was probably about time she told _him_ the truth.

  



End file.
